An investigation has found that the A Dog's Purpose viral video was fake

I am sad to see the boards closing because of the many trolls on this site.

The trolls on this site (or any other board) are not the reason IMDB is closing the message boards. There has been much worse trollery of a similar kind on other boards before this -- long before this. It's nothing new.

The message says that not many IMDB users use the message boards anyway, so we are a small number who can safely be ignored. And, the boards don't generate revenue - instead, they cost money. The constant posts giving links to illegal downloads leave IMDB open to lawsuits for copyright infringement, and posts by people advocating violence pose a different criminal liability issue. They need to pay lawyers and such to deal with this stuff, which is becoming more and more of a problem. They don't care that jerks and idiots post rubbish on the boards-- they are worried about the bottom line. IMDB is owned by Amazon, which wants to pay the bare minimum to keep business going.

I think it's only a question of time before they prohibit user reviews and other user-generated content as well. But it's all about $$$, not trolls. The trolls have been around forever and they aren't anything new. Nor are the fake news complaints on this site anything new. The same exact stuff was said about the Hobbit films back in 2012. That may have been before IMDB was acquired by Amazon - I'm not sure what year that occurred.

reply share

add reply

formatting help

Further to why IMDB is deleting the boards, here is what one of their administrators, Colin Needham, has to say (in a post since deleted). This reinforces the idea that it's about money and trouble, not about "trolls."

I can add more here for you ... your suggestion of rebuilding the boards is the first thing we considered when we looked at the next steps. We hate to cut features. The extra context is that in 2017 we are coming to the end of a multi-year technology migration which you may have seen covered in recent end-of-year messages. It is this migration which is enabling things like data publication within minutes of arrival by the database content team and new interfaces for photo contribution / display. Almost the whole of IMDb has been rebuilt behind-the-scenes on a modern scalable platform which can handle the traffic of a Top 40 web site along with two app platforms (iOS & Android) and a mobile site, plus data exports to a whole host of other systems, including Amazon Fire TV. This is on a scale which many people here are not appreciating; they still think of IMDb as a small site BUT that is because, out of all our traffic, boards are a tiny (and shrinking) share.



As more of IMDb is on the modern platform, we get faster and faster at adding new features and improving existing ones on a huge multi-billion page view scale. Unfortunately, this means that the older technology becomes more and more of drag and disproportionately slows progress, hence our desire to finish everything in 2017. When we sat down for our annual planning cycle in the second half of 2016, we looked at the options for everything which still needed to be migrated. We had deep discussions on what would migrate and stay the same, what would migrate and be improved and also what would not be worth migrating.



For 26 years IMDb has been collecting film, TV, celebrity and other information and creating what we hope are powerful and useful services on top of this data for our many different customers. Our strengths are in gathering, processing and publishing permanent information around entertainment. Message boards are quite a different thing than the rest of IMDb (see my comments in the post referenced above). For years, our customers have done nothing but complain about how the boards are run, what features are missing and how angry they are about how other users have treated them. This is reflected in the relative traffic shrinkage of the boards. We have reached the point where most of our customers do not even know they exist; many that do know about them have been scared away after bad experiences. We have lost a non-trivial number of customers due to bad experiences on the boards. This is wrong on so many levels.



Even despite all of these problems, and per the post of mine which you highlighted, we still see value in the boards. However, during the planning process when we looked at the time and effort required to rebuild the boards, it just did not make sense. We can better serve customers by getting better at that things at which we are already good -- the core functions of IMDb and building things on top of the real data. Essentially, in business terms, it is core competency issue. Wrangling temporary discussions around topics like entertainment which naturally cause friction is not an IMDb core competency; you can even see this in the complaints in the last 24 hours from people who want us to keep the boards, yet then tacitly admit that the boards are not very good anyway. We see the helpful suggestions that if only we did this, that, or the other, then all the problems will disappear. The reality is harder at this scale; I am not going to address them all, but volunteer moderators, buying other software, charging subscription fees have all been examined with the full information available to us, and if there was a magic wand which could be waved, we would have found it.



I love our boards. I ignore trolls. I am going to be sorry when the boards close. However, I am going be more excited about the new possibilities which we can build and deploy once the boards are gone and are no longer slowing us down. As we like to say at Amazon, it is still Day One.



Col

As for it being "Day 1," as far as I'm concerned, without the boards I will have no reason whatever to log into IMDB. So bye, bye IMDB come Feb. 20.

reply share

add reply

formatting help