A lot of people visit this site because of the boards. Won't the increased traffic benefit the site?
shareA lot of people visit these boards.
A lot more (like tens of millions) of people from countries like China have begun using IMDb and never use the boards. Thus they consider us expendable.
Skipping page long posts for over a year now.
I'm guessing moderation coats might have skyrocketed during the last couple of years. Trolls and other kinds of asshats turn some boards pretty quickly into a cesspit, where most of the posts need to be checked.
shareMaybe like MUBi they want to make money. They switched over to movie sales some tine ago and ditched the film comment. Just a week or so I got an email they were dumping whatever I had in the archives and gave me one week to retrieve it. But the link they gave was faulty.
I have had a number of internet free film/writing sites vanish. It's the nature of the beast.
Apparently previous platform that removed comment section, message board didn't regret it. Even got more traffic in some case:
https://medium.com/global-editors-network/why-news-websites-are-closing-their-comments-sections-ea31139c469d#.6vba3fvrq
Nowadays, News24’s engagement strategy focuses on encouraging people to write opinion pieces and opening comments only on the opinion pieces and some topical stories. “We found it was so much better. I would say if you had 100 comments [when the story-page comments were open], maybe 25% would be published. Now, as much as 80 to 85% get published,” Lakay says. News24 even noticed a growth in audience. “I think many people who were disgusted by the tone of the comments generally now felt it was a place they could return to,” adds Trench.
Not many opened them back, not ESPN, not BoxOfficeMojo, etc...
Won't the increased traffic benefit the site?
Not if people call out fixed ratings which hurts the reputation of the site at that stage we are expendable
Almost 10 000 protests https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/petition-to-keep-the-imdb-messageboards-going#