I know it happened a few years ago, but I still haven't heard a reason. They didn't want people to be offended?
What was the profit incentive? I would have monetized the f*ck out of those forums. Talk about a highly targeted audience. It was the main reason I visited the site.
Thoughts?
We've been over this: $$$
shareIf I was in charge of IMDB at the time, I would have put ads to amazon merch for each film in every forum.Since IMDB wouldn't be liable for the "harm" that trolls or whoever caused, I would have had minimal moderation since 99.99999% of posts were fine.
You have users creating your content for free and that's driving highly targetable traffic. How do they make more money by shutting it all down? Same question for twitter kicking off Trump. Unless Dorsey is going to make more from the Dems, than he would from losing the biggest draw on his site, I just don't get it. I also don't believe that Dorsey is interested in making the world a better place. *gag*
Donnie's account was finally shut down because he used Twitter to spread hate and call names, which is a violation of the terms of usage. All social media sites have these terms and expect users to comply. If you or I had posted the same type of messages our accounts would have been closed immediately. They just looked the other way because he was "president."
shareThis was a topic a couple of weeks ago. My response was:
A lot of people aren't aware that IMDb was taken over by Amazon back in 1998. There were a couple of theories suggested by posters right before the boards shut down:
• Amazon didn't like the negative comments about movies because they were afraid it would hurt their sales of DVDs. (Yet members can still rate and write reviews of films. I don't get this one.)
• There was too much troll activity and it was too expensive to hire more moderators. (Come on! A multi-billion-dollar corporation like Amazon couldn't afford moderators...?!) I never believed this one either.
We will probably never know the true reason.
Interestingly, Amazon recently removed the commenting feature on product reviews on Amazon.com. This means that stupid reviews based on inaccuracies just sit there with nobody able to respond and fact-check them.
shareone wild guess, among many other equally probable reasons :
they didn't want to be responsible for all the vile/vituperative/slanderous commentary on their website, and didnt want to hire a gaggle of moderators to keep it all sanitized.
what they -didnt- count on was the amount of traffic these forums generated.
i use IMDB now almost exclusively for the occasional query on a movie's cast - wiki is a better source much of the time for actual background on films of interest and substance.
Every site will have vile commentary to some degree. And maybe I would have made some symbolic moves to "take a stand" if I had been in charge. If my only job was to maximize traffic-ad revenue-profits.
Maybe the question should be: Why doesn't IMDB bring back the forums? The only reason that I can see is that even though they would increase traffic and profits, it just isn't worth the headache (?) for Jeff Bezos? Selling an extra 10k blu-rays a week is peanuts to him.
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They were too lazy to monitor them and the arguing/trolling had gotten pretty bad.
Plus, there's some rumors celebrities didn't like their work being criticized, so IMDB was pressured.
They were too lazy to monitor them and the arguing/trolling had gotten pretty bad.
This. If they'd put their foot down and gotten the trolling under control sooner the boards would still be around.
When you start losing in the arena of ideas, you close the arena and claim that arenas are bad.
shareExactly! Same reason Yahoo News shut down their comments section. Comments were OVERWHELMINGLY critical of the quality of journalism and the blatant propagandizing in their articles. Cannot allow the truth of the amount of public opposition to be seen when you are trying to drive home a political agenda.
share> Why did IMDB get rid of their forums?
Why did the chicken cross the road? To shit on the farmer's shoes.