Because it was popular and people could say what they liked. So unlike Reddit or Youtube it didn't lend itself to being used as a controlled environment shill forum. So it had to go.
...it didn't lend itself to being used as a shill forum
You are a moron right ? You've heard of that word "moron", right ?
It's dead, Jim!
shareBecause it had gained a reputation as a troll-infested hell-scape, which had probably started to lower advertising revenues but was certainly something Amazon didn't want its brand and reputation associated with. They're a retailer. They're not a social media company. They didn't need that headache.
They faced a choice between cleaning it up (expensive, difficult. An experiment with getting users to register with credit card details failed spectacularly) or getting rid of it (cheap, easy).
And as only 7% of IMDb visitors ever found their way to the message boards, it wasn't the site's main selling point -- that's the database itself -- so they dumped it.
Or shorter answer: money.
im curious how much they lost in usage traffic though. i never go there anymore unless i need to look up info i wasnt sure about. whereas when they had the boards i was all over it all the time
share
No idea. But I'd imagine that repeat visits are not as valuable to advertisers as unique visitors. If 93% of users didn't use the message boards anyway, perhaps whatever they lost in usage traffic was essentially worthless anyway. But that's guesswork really.
Same as you, I rarely visit the place any more unless I need information that isn't available on Wikipedia or Letterboxd. But they're clearly doing alright.
What I heard was that some of the posters on the IMDB boards were SO bad, that IMDB started to think they were a legal liability.
Not just the loudmouthed right-wing trolls (some of whom have moved here), but I'm told it was a popular meeting place for stalker-fans and they were posting personal information about the movements and home addresses of famous people. And if that were for real and not just an internet rumor, imagine how much legal trouble IMDB would be in if someone got an actor's home address off of the IMDB boards and carried out an act of violence? So that was the rumor, but I can't say I ever saw evidence of these stalker-fans there. But I also can't say I ever checked out of the boards of the sort of hot young actors who tend to attract psychos, either.
You got a point there.
While I think that IMDb aka Amazon no longer wanted to pay so much for the moderators.
The automatic system didn't work so well.
Trolls and fakes loved to report posts en masse.
With enough reports these inconvenient posts were automatically deleted.
Which in turn led to complaints from the deleted posters.
THAT needed expensive moderators. --> Poof, message boards gone. 😥​
Btw. I also complained. *ahem*
With all this rumor and speculation, I still don't know what led to the mass deletion of the boards, all we have here is a lot a likely possibilities.
I think it boils down to the boards being more trouble than they were worth, and that could mean either costing more money than the advertising revenue they generated, or being too much of a potential liability. Most internet company decisions come down to money, after all.
There were some dodgy people on the old IMDb boards. There was one guy who had an absolutely insane level of hatred for Reese Witherspoon. Seriously, you'd have thought she was the AntiChrist. This went on for months and months. Eventually her 'people' got to hear about him and he ended up getting arrested (another poster who knew who the guy was posted a link to local news reports). Items were seized from his home as well - I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they were of the hammer/cable-ties/bin-liners variety. I'm sure his computer, too.
shareHey, that's some confirmation of my rumors about stalkers! Thanks! I totally missed all that, I posted at IMDB but I doubt I ever once looked at Witherspoon's board!
And I can see that that was the sort of incident that might have put fear into the IMDB management, and made them look very hard at whether the boards were worth the expense involved or not. Or the risk of having to deal with people like Witherspoon and her lawyers.
It was because of the female Ghostbusters movie and all the trolls.
Signed, million man.
IIRC it wasn't just IMDb, but lots of sites, mostly culture/news, I think, removed their comment capabilities around the same time. I just assumed it was to magnify/strengthen the marketing/messaging/narratives the sites wanted to push, via silencing the vox populi.
share