Claiming they're "no longer providing a positive, useful experience" for the vast majority of its users, IMDB has announced that as of February 20, 2017, their message boards will be no more:
As part of our ongoing effort to continually evaluate and enhance the customer experience on IMDb, we have decided to disable IMDb's message boards on February 20, 2017. This includes the Private Message system. After in-depth discussion and examination, we have concluded that IMDb's message boards are no longer providing a positive, useful experience for the vast majority of our more than 250 million monthly users worldwide. The decision to retire a long-standing feature was made only after careful consideration and was based on data and traffic.
[...] Because IMDb's message boards continue to be utilized by a small but passionate community of IMDb users, we announced our decision to disable our message boards on February 3, 2017 but will leave them open for two additional weeks so that users will have ample time to archive any message board content they'd like to keep for personal use. During this two-week transition period, which concludes on February 19, 2017, IMDb message board users can exchange contact information with any other board users they would like to remain in communication with (since once we shut down the IMDb message boards, users will no longer be able to send personal messages to one another). We regret any disappointment or frustration IMDb message board users may experience as a result of this decision.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Wednesday February 08 2017, @04:36PM
I know that the raging nerds here (heh, says me) don't pay attention to hollywood and suits and all that crap but the reason is a whole lot more cynical than a "people are mean to each other :(" thing. It's because hollywood is making a shitton of money internationally with vapid content that other countries enjoy due to epic special effects and somewhat-racist pandering to the east-asian market. Domestically this is not so much the case. Because for some reason entire generations raised on empty effects are starting to dislike empty effects. Hollywood like any other industry center prefers safety and stability and would overall just prefer you pay for a movie and not even see it. Critics that are not in their pocket are therefore terrifying to them, especially the ones that won't be bought.
Internet makes it easy to focus on one thing down to its fundamentals. Hollywood likes money. Critics don't like hollywood. Imdb probably likes money too. Boom bang shamalang
Or maybe they are legitimately studying referrers and traffic and outbound links and conversions, decided they might as well cut some fat out of the codebase if people are just using facebook and shit. Granted, I'll never make a facebook account and I deleted my twitter account out of sheer disgust during this election. So people like me lose out. But my preferred medium of bitching is youtube videos anyway. So I've got that going for me.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday February 08 2017, @04:58PM
> Imdb probably likes money too.
The site is owned by Amazon, which also produces and distributes programming.