MovieChat Forums > General Discussion > My Dilemma in Using Amazon

My Dilemma in Using Amazon


I just recently made a short film, and I'm considering posting it on Prime Video. The only thing is I hate Amazon. They have cheated so many sellers, in general. They're responsible for shutting down imdb's message boards. And I believe they hacked into my account and blocked me, so that way I wouldn't be able to say anything negative about them, on one of the alternate message boards.

But, there's no denying that they have one of the largest markets in the world. And so many people use "Prime." It wouldn't make a lot of sense not to consider them. The business side of me is saying post my film there. The personal side of me is like "HELL NO!"

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Can we watch the short film anywhere ATM?

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Yes! It's on YouTube and Vimeo On Demand! It's called "Little Things."

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Apart from shutting down the IMDb message boards I also dislike Amazon for establishing a monopoly over audio books via their site Audible.com. Once you could buy the CD's but now you have to go through Audible and pay through the nose for a digital download in their proprietary and restricted format.

I thought there was supposed to be a law against monopolies but Amazon just seems to be able to do what they like.



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Monopoly is a delicate thing to manage. In one hand it hinders competition. In the other hand, we're becoming more and more global these days. Amazon might be a monopoly in America, but for the rest of the world they're not even close.

If the gov hinders Amazon's growth, they will face competitions from other countries. USA is not the sole provider of anything tech anymore. Competitions may happen eventually (see: Huawei, TikTok.)

It's a different world now compared to the heyday of Microsoft. Microsoft was a monopoly basically in the entire world. From Australia to Africa one cannot escape using Windows, genuine or otherwise. Amazon? Only in USA.

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Get the downloadable book version, convert it to epub and get a text to speech reader with a voice that you like. That's what I do.

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or........ actually read.

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Reading a physical book means that you can do nothing else at the time. Listening to a book means you can do other things like housework, shopping, driving etc at the same time and if you love books, you get to go through many more that way. That's why I listen to all my books now.

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I get it. For me though, I like to fully immerse myself in a book and devote my full attention to it. :)

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I can count on one hand the number of times I've used Amazon, and then it was only as a last resort. I'm not one bit impressed with it for reasons too numerous to list here.

If you do decide to show your film on Prime Video, carefully read any fine print if you need to sign an agreement. Make sure you retain ownership of your work.

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why did Amazon shut down the imdb message board if in fact that's accurate

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Because Amazon owns IMDB. The decision came from the top.

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didn't know that, thanks

yeah, I read a lot of the exchanges between users and management and their rationales never added up to me

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They claimed it was due to too much troll activity. I don't believe this for a minute because a company as big as Amazon could easily afford to hire moderators. Blocking the accounts of offensive users would be very simple.

One of the message board users proposed that it was because Amazon didn't like negative reviews of movies. They were afraid it would hurt their DVD and Blu-ray sales. This hypothesis makes more sense to me. It's all about the money.

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thanks for the reply

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You're welcome.

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Everything you said is 1000% wrong.

I was a registered member of the IMDB forums going back to 2000. Back in the day, only die hard TV and movie fans posting on the forums. By 2015, the forums were completely overrun by troll factions from various places (Reddit, Stormfront, etc.). Many of these troll factions were from fringe groups (MRAs, Alt Right, Neo-Nazi, anti-SJWs) or outrage brigades who would camp out at a board to organize mass downvoting/negative review sprees at Rotten Tomatoes, YouTube, etc., go on raids or spread disinfo. (When the IMDB forums shut down, you can see them at their other sites expressing disappointment that they weren't going to be able to raid forums anymore.).

So, hardly any real IMDB users or TV/movie fans were using the site anymore. It was all troll factions and outrage brigades. For example, if you look at the boards for A Dog's Life right before the forums closed, not one post there was from a person who'd seen the film. At The Ghostbusters forum, I know for a fact that a user who would go by different variations of the name "carrot" was a troll farmer. Going by the time stamp, this person would start posting at 6 AM and post every hour on the hour until 12-1 AM for months on end without fail.

On top of all of these bad actors, the forums were overrun with bored teenagers who would camp out at various boards engaging in "message board raids." So, you'd have kids from Marvel movie forums suddenly spamming DC movie forums with a spate of anti-DC posts and vice versa.

The boards had become so bad that I quit them in November 2016, three months before Amazon made its announcement to shut them down. Given how bad they were then, I don't understand how anybody could doubt why the forums were closed.

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So it was because of trolls? It sounds like you have some insider information.

So why didn't Amazon hire some moderators? It's not like they couldn't afford it.

I would like to know the truth behind the shutdown.

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I don't have "insider information" necessarily. It's just that as long as I was on the forums, I know that Amazon had both mods and a moderation system in place. The way it worked is that if enough people clicked on the report button, the post would either be deleted outright or go into queue, which would be eventually be reviewed by a mod. There was evidence of this at the old boards; whenever a post was deleted, you'd see, "This message has been deleted by an administrator."

This system worked well for a very long time. What happened is that the trolls learned how to game it. One of the ways they did this was by posting threads that seemed innocuous but were clearly meant to needle posters on a particular board. So, they went the passive-aggressive route of trolling.

For example, take the Superman franchise. If Marvel fanboys decided to annoy DC fans whenever a new movie came out, they wouldn't be outright vulgar or offensive (as in, "DC fanboys suck!") They would just post endless variations of, "Why can't DC make a good CBM?" or, "Another DC flop!" or, "This is why Marvel is the king of CBM movies." This stuff would never get flagged because who is to tell whether someone was just stating an opinion or being a troll? Unless racist or inflammatory language was used, it was impossible to tell, so these kinds of posts stayed up.

Ditto, A Dog's Life. It wasn't violating the TOS if dozens of people kept posting, "This movie is evil!" or "Let's boycott" or "Let's mass downvote this movie at Rotten Tomatoes." Since they weren't violating the TOS, their posts would stay up and they wound up running the board.

So, this is how the trolls took over the IMDB forums. If there were any doubt about how bad things had gotten before the shutdown, here is a perfect post from someone at the Batman vs Superman boards: https://moviechat.org/tt2975590/Batman-v-Superman-Dawn-of-Justice/58c826c22214d80b5c03792e/Suicide-Watch-for-IMDB-trolls.

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That sounds like a feasible explanation. Thank you for your response.

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Thanks. I wanted to go into more detail, but MC's character limit prevented me. In any event, hopefully you get the idea. When people talk about trolls at the IMDB, they're not talking about people who use racist/sexist slurs, profanity, or anything offensive like that. They're talking about people--many who didn't see a movie or TV show--overrunning boards with stuff to annoy and upset people. Some more examples:

1. If a movie or TV show was announced that happened to have a female lead, trolls writing countless posts like, "I'm tired of Mary Sues," or, "Why is feminazism all the rage now?" or, "Oh, no! Not another Mary Sue."

2. Ditto for a black character lead. The go-to thread was always, "This is PC run amok!" or "I'm tired of forced diversity/SJWs in Hollywood!" (You can see a similar thread like this going up here at MC in reference to Dune, but *thankfully*, it's only the ONE thread there, as opposed the dozens that appeared at the IMDB: https://moviechat.org/tt1160419/Dune/5f602aa47205727e8cc7343a/White-washing-is-a-bad-idea-Woke-washing-is-just-as-bad.";

3. Going to a classic movie or director post and constantly posting how overrated both were, but more to boost a favorite IP. For example, Christopher Nolan fans would hit the Kubrick boards constantly ranting about how overrated he and 2001: A Space Odyssey were (so they could boost Interstellar).

It wasn't just the trolling that was the issue but the fact that so many posters had never really seen the movies or TVs in question and were disrupting the boards for the ones who did. I think it was A Dog's Life and 12 Years a Slave that sealed the IMDB's fate. There were hundreds of posts on these boards and maybe 5% were from people who'd actually seen these films. If Amazon had done a serious mass purge, that would've gotten rid of the aholes, yes, but there would've practically no one left to use the boards, so the company probably felt that it made more sense to shut them down entirely.

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Do you think there are former imdb users using imdb board to ask if this or that actors are gay ? If when we say that is not our business they would harass us or keep deleting our posts. I noticed one of user (I think he is lurking around on moviechat) keep using "of" instead "have", posting stuff around the board to flaming everyone all hours in the day and night without a rest by using different names. I always suspect he used super fast computer when his fast responses came up by reading timestamps and my timestamps.

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politics.

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bingo!

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Because the public then has less say over whether a movie or series is any good as opposed to fake accounts pushing crap media reviews to make you think the product is good. The comments on the message board can screw that up.

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It may just be a necessary evil in order to get more eyes on your work and may put you in a position to not need to use their platform in the future.

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fuk amazon

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Amazon Launches Game Streaming Service Luna

https://www.thewrap.com/amazon-launches-game-streaming-service-luna/

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