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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 08 2017, @03:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-a-wrap dept.

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.

Variety, BBC, TheWrap.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday February 08 2017, @04:33PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 08 2017, @04:33PM (#464595)

    As movies become more formulaic, more repetitive endless sequel or remake of a copy, less risky and innovative, and retreat into shoveling crap, there is probably less to talk about.

    Imagine what it would have been like to have a IMDB back when Star Wars was released in 77 or 78 or whatever it was. Or the Charles Bronson vigilante era movies. Or the era of Dirty Harry movies. Or the era of the great Western epics. Interesting stuff used to happen in Hollywood movies. Not so much in the last decade or two.

    A coworker was making the analogy of Hollywood movies being mismanaged by the same kind of pressures that mismanaged American car manufacturers in the 70s. The quest for CYA leads to a lot of trash being shipped out. The problem is the only competitor of note is Bollywood and I'm not seeing "typical Americans" watch that unless they put acid in the water. Then again shipping stuff no one likes has never stopped the movie biz before, so ...

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday February 08 2017, @04:47PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 08 2017, @04:47PM (#464605)

    OH good example here:

    Imagine a discussion board for transistors where people used to talk about the exciting world of transistors from 1950 to perhaps 2000. The great conversion from germanium to silicon. The first epitaxials and the death of point contacts. Quantum weirdness with tunnel diodes which commercially flopped. The exciting new world of MOS. The commercial failure of gallium arsenide. The days back then transistor SSRs of modest power first became cheaper than electromechanical power relays. VFDs start to rule the world. Rectifiers go from 50 volt PIV to everything's a 1000 volts PIV. Remember making "diode strings" for high voltage vacuum tube power supplies with equalization resistors and transient capacitors across each diode and you stacked like 10 of them in series for a decade or two and then some mfgr starts shipping 5000 volt PIV rectifiers so you replace like 30 parts on a circuit board with one little diode. Its a little before my time but transistors used to be so low performance they sold them on alpha values and they converted to betas due to high gain around the silicon conversion I donno 1960 or something. RTL DTL TTL made of discrete components. Packaging going from metal cans to plastic and leads going from thru hole to SMD. The first time somebody shipped a darlington in a transistor can. Who remembers jfets? Pour a little of your 40 oz out on the ground in memory of the MPF102. In the pre-internet era who remembers cross reference catalogs for replacement transistor purposes? Who here cut the top off metal can transistors to act as light detectors like in the 70s or 80s because they were bored and didn't want to mail order a single phototransistor across the country with a $25 minimum order (back when minimum wage was like $3). Who remembers SCRs? Triacs? How about stupid Zener effect tricks using non-Zener diodes?

    I mean all that stuff was interesting if you were around back then or know the history.

    But today imagine how dead a transistor discussion board would be. "Hey guys we sure love ISO9000 practices" "How about that MTBF increasing by another boring decimal point" "If you though 0402 was a small footprint try 0201!" "microcontroller manufacturers stealing 'our' SOT-23 footprint for their own use"

  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 08 2017, @05:15PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday February 08 2017, @05:15PM (#464616)

    Imagine what it would have been like to have a IMDB back when Star Wars was released in 77 or 78 or whatever it was. Or the Charles Bronson vigilante era movies. Or the era of Dirty Harry movies. Or the era of the great Western epics. Interesting stuff used to happen in Hollywood movies. Not so much in the last decade or two.

    Yeah, but people are still talking about those movies. Go to the IMDB message forums and you'll probably find lots of discussion about those movies, decades after they were released.

    The problem is the only competitor of note is Bollywood and I'm not seeing "typical Americans" watch that unless they put acid in the water.

    They're fun to watch once in a long while, but you can only take so many spontaneous dance routines in the middle of a movie.

    The real competitor you're missing is TV shows. Between HBO, Netflix original content, Amazon original content, etc., there's a lot of TV shows out there these days that are much more engaging than today's Hollywood movies. Just look at Game of Thrones.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @09:38PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @09:38PM (#464779)

      > Just look at Game of Thrones.

      Very true, not to mention, Game of Thrones is actually quite long. Each episode is 1 hour. That is the low end of a feature film. I remember TV Series being 20-30 mins and generally of a lower production quality than feature films, but GoT?

      Exotic locations (check), large generally good cast (check), good stage (check), good quality filming (check), good sound (check), very good post production (check), industry standard CGI (check).

      I mean, a single GoT series could have been compressed into around 3 hours, and it would be a decent feature film in its own right.

      In many ways I see it less as a TV Series, and more as a collection of film sequels forming an long arching story. I really like the format. The enjoyment of a feature film with every episode, but enough sequels that the writers can explore as much of the story they want without having to miss bits out, or otherwise sacrifice the story in order to fit into 3 hours tops ( The LotR Extended editions were between 3 and 4 hours long, really the upper limit for me for one viewing).

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @05:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @05:52PM (#464637)

    As movies become more formulaic, more repetitive endless sequel or remake of a copy, less risky and innovative, and retreat into shoveling crap, there is probably less to talk about.

    Imagine what it would have been like to have a IMDB back when Star Wars was released in 77 or 78 or whatever it was. Or the Charles Bronson vigilante era movies. Or the era of Dirty Harry movies. Or the era of the great Western epics. Interesting stuff used to happen in Hollywood movies. Not so much in the last decade or two.

    This kind of talk annoys me to no end. There is a lot of repetitive endless sequels, but that's because that's what the customer wants. More to the point, there are countless innovative new movies coming out. Many of them even succeed. But nobody ever thinks of them.

    As one example which springs to mind, the Disney movie Frozen [wikipedia.org]. It is incredibly innovative and subversive (in the TVTropes connotation), especially for somebody as mainstream as Disney. A movie in which the man is a betraying gold-digger (not a prince charming), a literal witch hunt against the queen, and numerous other non-standard subversions of audience expectations.

    Or we have movies like American Sniper [wikipedia.org], Brokeback Mountain [wikipedia.org], Hacksaw Ridge [wikipedia.org], The Matrix [wikipedia.org], Avatar [wikipedia.org], and countless others which I'm too lazy to actually try to list. That's not counting the neigh-countless B-list, C-list, or independent films.

    You only hear about the "Rocky: Part 16" movies? Well, see previous statement about what sells. You can't really blame Hollywood for selling people what they want, can you? That the publicize the next blockbuster is not to say they that innovation doesn't exist, or movie studios don't try new things.

    • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday February 08 2017, @06:43PM

      by butthurt (6141) on Wednesday February 08 2017, @06:43PM (#464663) Journal

      Avatar is a perfect example of what we like to say “Give me the same thing… only different!”

      -- http://www.savethecat.com/beat-sheets/stc-beats-out-avatar [savethecat.com]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @09:36PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @09:36PM (#464777)

        I want to clarify that the list of movies I listed were each different in different ways. The Avatar example was one talking about technology, and how it was a pioneer in "good 3D." The story itself may have been lackluster. Much like how Frozen animation styles and techniques were fairly well established, and the characters were formulaic, but their interactions and the situation were innovative.

        As for the pithy sounding "Give me the same thing… only different!" ... What's that even supposed to mean? I think literally every story has been done before. See The Hero's Journey [wikipedia.org]... or TVTropes [tvtropes.org] if you prefer [tvtropes.org]. I defy you to name a single story written in the past 1000 years for which there is no predecessor it was "copying."

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @10:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @10:12PM (#464796)

    They have always been formulaic. Most of all media in all forms is. The main reason it seems not so, when looking further into the past, is the weaker less original examples have faded into obscurity.

        It also helps that the sheer volume of what gets made these days, and the ease it can be distributed, means that the 99% that is crud is a deeper pool.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2017, @01:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 09 2017, @01:42AM (#464840)

    What you are describing is true but also false. Its Schrodinger's movie! :)

    But seriously you are describing survivor bias.

    Take this list for example http://www.imdb.com/year/1987/?ref_=tt_ov_inf [imdb.com]

    The top 10 of year 1987 are all good movies (though I personally can not stand dirty dancing but whatevs...).

    It is also the same year of Superman 4, Leonard Part 6, and Jaws the revenge (4th in the series).

    For every 10 good movies they make they churn out 3000 bad ones. You look back and see the good stuff. But that is because you have the rose colored glasses of history on your side.

    Or take say 1977 since you brought it up. It gave us lovely gems like http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076125/?ref_=adv_li_tt [imdb.com] and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074213/?ref_=adv_li_tt [imdb.com] and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076137/?ref_=adv_li_tt [imdb.com]