What REALLY Happened to IMDB - Donald Trump

With these type of threads, it's like the old IMDB never left

That wouldnt shock me at all.

A TechCrunch piece written by a "clueless far left hack" ... I certainly think the author was clueless, and they may well be far left, but cluelessness come in all political stripes, and it's an objective fact that there's astonishingly more cluelessness on the right than the left (based on asking liberals and conservatives *factual questions*). Way more hacks on the right, too, if you define a "hack" as someone who writes untruthfully for hire.

Now, there's no question that the blockbuster movie message boards became a cesspool of trolling and hate, thanks to IMDB's disinterest in monitoring them. By which I mean that there were typically about 4 such threads on a front page of 20, which is 4 too many, and they were very often the most active. You might see a bunch of threads with 6 or 9 answers, and then there'd be at least one hateful trolling one with 42.

Some idiot simply measured the amount and nature of the activity on the most boards, and correctly concluded that it was largely meaningless trolling and troll-rebuttal. OK, so because the boards are 55% crap, we'll eliminate them! With no sense of the value provided by the other 45%, and no sense of who used the good 45%.

Agreed, envam

I think "alt-right" (racist/sexist) trolling has become worse recently, and the rise of Trump doesn't help. I also think that some people (perhaps including Bezos) could tolerate that kind of thing before when Obama was president, because it was like "ha ha, you trolls are all het up and ineffectual" but when they actually won, it was extremely frustrating.

I'm as far left as you can get and I don't really see what's so far-left about that article, though I do think the article is wrong in its overly negative assessment of the site. And I mean, it's true that there's a tremendous rise in racism going on right now in society as a whole, which is naturally reflected in what people post on the internet. There are far-right forces rising everywhere. It's been going on in Europe for quite some time and is now happening in the US. I think Trump is more a symptom of it than a cause, but he isn't exactly helping either, to say the least.

Still though, I don't think that had anything to do with the boards getting shut down. I think it was greed, pure and simple. Amazon didn't care about the boards because they didn't bring in money, so they didn't want to spend the money on running them, regardless of what the users thought. There was a perceptible increase in racism and the like on imdb boards (especially on the politics board, though it had been heading that way for quite a long time already anyway), but I don't think it was substantial enough to ruin the site as a whole. There was still a great deal of quality discussion on the site, so long as people didn't stray too much into politics.

IMDB is Fake News, trust me, they won't shut down, etc ;)

Skepticism engendered over the demise of the Internet Movie Database Message Boards has given rise to entertaining conspiracy theories. No one bought the lame and bogus excuse that troll posts were to blame. Sure, let the situation run rampant for years and then decide to pull the plug on practically no notice a week before the Academy Awards? The dimmest among observers could sense something extremely rotten in Denmark. Many said, Follow the Money, which proves true in 99% of all cases of just about everything. Theories were bandied about that actors, film studios, or powerful corporations were unhappy that unfavorable talk and ratings dimmed the luster of expensive and glitzy PR campaigns. Others went further afield, suggesting terrorists or other criminal gangs were somehow using the boards to communicate by code. Best is that Jeff Bezos, Col Needham, or both, were themselves involved in criminal activity (child sex trafficking was suggested, with or without pizza parlor involvement) and some of the movie boards (no one knows which, or exactly what was said) were being used by whistleblowers exposing their wicked, depraved, and vile corruption. Word has it that such activities on the part of Bezos were seriously harmed by Trump's travel restrictions cutting the supply of sweet innocent young refugee flesh, and the boards fell victim, sacrificed ere they expose his excesses. I offer no suggestions, only a sampling of the suppositions.