The IMDb Forums Are Gone

Well gentlemen it looks like another bunker has been knocked out by the PC howitzers.  The decades-old IMDb forums are dead and buried.

This comes after an announcement last month that the forums were no longer giving a ‘positive’ vibe, which I think may translate to: ‘Someone at Amazon didn’t like what they were reading’.  This is probably not about politics, although it could be that too.  N.B. I can actually think of one or two movies released in the past year that were highly, highly politically charged that were being discussed at will without moderation would’ve been contenders for that theory.

It could simply have been a case of some powerful puppet master, somewhere up the food chain, one night stumbling across a negative discussion and ordering the whole thing nuked from orbit.  The owners have said that their discussions were more or moved to social media.  I don’t believe that for a second either.  When I noticed severe vote rigging on the IMDb for the first time by distributors (who else will create one thousand accounts to influence a backwater DTV?), what caught my eye was glowing ratings with angry discussion threads in extreme contrast.  Hmm..

What do (did) you use the IMDb for?  I can say two things; discussion and ratings.  Looking at the former first, as alluded to above those used to be a good way of not only interacting but getting a feel for the movie, its trivia etc.  That’s gone, now I think traffic will suffer because of it.  The other thing is finding out if a movie is probably going to be a waste of time.

While some are obviously presenting suspect ratings, the IMDb is still a good source of getting a feel for how good a movie is depending on its rating out of 10, especially if it’s an old movie that hasn’t had its score tampered with.

But here’s the thing, I don’t even need to visit their site anymore to check that.  Google a random movie and the search engine will give you IMDb’s rating for it without actually clicking on their site.  So now I can personally say that I’ll have practically no visits to the IMDb ever again.

Fuck you corporate!