I keep thinking the oldest posts are eight years old and when I click they are random dates … like the one I was just on was 16 years old. Then I remembered that would have been when they were imported from IMDb! Hard to believe this site has been around that long already. I would love to know how many members there are and how much traffic it gets!
Edited the post title to reflect that it is indeed 5 years old!
Been a little over 5 years. February 2017 to be exact.
share7 years or so and about 30 or so regular users
Well the latest posts say about 7 years...
April's math seems to be more accurate though...
The one I was just on said 8 years though for the oldest posts. How do you know how many users?
shareI don't. I speculate it may be more like 50 but that may be stretching it..
shareDo you mean on GD board or the whole site?
shareWhole
shareA lot of the posters are the same people. Especially the trolls.
shareWell. That depends. Do you want to count individuals or include socks as well?
shareYes that certainly sucks. And they only let an IP have one account? Do they use a VPN? Not that you would know I’m just asking questions here hehe. That would be time consuming to be different people I think. So strange!
shareReally? It never occurred to me that people would have socks here.
What would be the point?
The point is that some people have very miserable lives and they are very miserable in them and only get enjoyment out of trying to put misery onto others. It's a very, very sad existence.
shareI was actually thinking of doing it just for fun. There seems to be so many trolls here, if you can't beat em, join em:)
shareI feel that would be beneath you.
shareI thought it would be fun to be somebody else here for a time.
Creating a totally different identity from your actual one, might be fun.
I'm smarter than intothenight, as long as I can stop with the .........signature, no one will know its me:)
Quasimodo would find you out. He has a nose, I mean snout...for that sort of thing.
sharelmao, I guess there's that.
But like, does socking help one troll? lol
It's hard to find a place to discuss movies. Only a small number actually do. And I just look forward for the few snippets of conversation I have hear and there, from time to time. And this is how I feel here or facebook, and a little bit on reddit. A lot of it is nonsense: people just bored and mindlessly killing time on the internet.
Yes it does …
shareYou will find posts as old as IMDB if you look. When you see a post count beside a user name then it was posted on Moviechat.
shareOh yes but the oldest it shows the posts are before you click on them is 8 years no matter when they were posted on IMDb.
shareI've seen posts from 17/18 years ago here.
shareHere's one that is 10 years old
https://moviechat.org/tt0116250/Evita/58c7716393cef4080d792e90/Great-Madonna-interview-about-WE
And 16 years old
https://moviechat.org/tt0081112/Mangiati-vivi/58c7364f5ec57f0478facd90/snoop-madra-madra
Ahhh this is right. I am wrong. Haha. I was just on a couple in a row that said eight years… so that’s what I was thinking. Totally cool if the dates are all accurate! I can’t believe I never noticed that before!
shareI think that on busy boards IMDB would purge them every so often. So if you go to a popular board the posts won't be as old. But if you go to one that didn't get much traffic you can find much older ones.
sharePurge as in delete the whole thing? People must have hated that. I didn’t post a whole lot on there (as I don’t really on here, read a lot of it though here and there that’s for sure!!), but I never saw that happen to a board. Makes me happy once again that the information that was on those boards survived and made it here. Thank you to Jim once again! 😊
shareIt's been said on this thread there are 30 to 50 regulars. I beg to differ. I think there are hundreds if you count all the individual boards.
When I was Admin on filmboards I counted our total and eliminated all the socks. There were about 80 weekly regulars, but about 30 daily. But filmboards only has fools on it's General Discussion. The movie boards are dead compared to MovieChat.
50 is far too low. There wouldn't even be advertizing here if that was the case.
You can tell the difference between IMDb posts, and MC posts, because the old IMDb accounts don’t have a post count after the name.
Also here is a 16 year old topic that I created
https://moviechat.org/nm0001475/JohnLithgow/58a8c596f258b707c4d8c356/I-lost-all-respect-for-him
Sadly it still feels kind of dead too
shareAgreed, but not sure anything out there is better.
shareThere isn't. Only other thing I can think of is r/movies and Reddit blows and removes so many posts for no reason.
shareI'm in a few facebook movie groups, but I've yet to find one that focuses on serious film discussion without every post turning into a shitshow.
shareI'm in a TCM Backlots group and it's never been disappointing. There are always great vintage and behind-the-scenes photos being posted there.
share
There may simply be no way of doing it. I'm reliably informed that behind the scenes Letterboxd has, for a number of years, been trying to conjure up a message board group feature. But it's never materialised, because they quite like their reputation of not being a complete shitshow.
Personally, I think there is a way of doing it and would amend my first sentence to 'There may simply be no way of doing it that is free of charge to the end user'. But then it becomes about whether the numbers stack up.
I was someone who didn't think IMDB was that bad. The trolls were heavy on new movies and the "fanboy" heavy properties like Star Wars, but most boards were just m0vie fans having a discussion. Particularly with older movies.
share
I was on those IMDb message boards on and off for sixteen years. And they definitely got worse, but I don't think they got any worse than anywhere else on the internet. The internet in general got worse. It wasn't 'an IMDb problem', it's a 'There are arseholes everywhere' problem.
But it had a reputation for being awful, which was presumably starting to do damage to the brand. Amazon could've fixed it if they wanted to, but they evidently decided it was cheaper and easier to get rid.
This reminds me of televisionwithoutpity.com, which had paid moderators to keep discussion respectful, but wasn't able to make the financials work.
sharePaid moderators is one thing.
I think the crucial part is simply to charge users. People tend to value what they pay for. And who is going to burn through dozens of troll/hate speech accounts if they have to pay for each one... probably with a different credit / debit card because the site has your previous details on record.
I just think making users pay for the service -- under clear T&Cs -- would clear up a lot of the problems in and of itself...
... But I'm certain I'm not the first person to think such a scheme might work. I'd imagine Letterboxd have thought of it (They have paid membership tiers. They could add group message boards as a feature to one of those tiers.)
I imagine Amazon thought about it when they were wondering what to do with the IMDb boards... and, presumably, the number-crunching just doesn't work: not enough people will pay for such a service to make it feasible, I guess.
I think Facebook and Twitter allow the majority of people to have the sorts of discussions they want to have, and that maybe takes away the demand for a paid service. I wonder if the number of people who want to have the sorts of conversations WE would like to have here, are just not very many. Even televisionwithoutpity started with lots of recaps, and descended quickly into snark. Very well-educated snark, I must say! But snark nonetheless. (And, in retrospect, not always directed productively.)
I think the internet as a whole maybe suffers from a tendency for certain voices to dominate the discussion and stop everyone else from speaking unless they agree (or are a troll), whether by ridiculing others or in some other way I haven't yet quite been able to identify. But there just doesn't seem to be a place for people who just want to discuss things in a reasonably serious way, in some amount of depth, but still able to give their honest opinions. Or maybe there isn't a large enough group that wants to do that, to support the kind of website that would be able to survive financially.
But i agree with you that the solution is to charge users. I do think the internet is going back towards more of a paid model. Lots of content that used to be free is paywalled now. So maybe things will make a turn and someone will come up with a way to have a paid discussion site. I agree that once you have to pay for things, that in itself would make lots of the trolls go away, but also would probably reduce total traffic which defeats the purpose of having active discussions.
Yeah. I think you're right about all of that.
Message boards are old-fashioned. They're an overhang from the early web. They've been supplanted in the minds of most people by Web 2.0 social media. And that's without anyone having the audacity to ask for a subscription fee to use a message board.
Personally, I think if I attempted to create an app to severely limit conversation while giving the appearance of being a tool for communication, it would end up looking a lot like Twitter -- where people shout over each other in a vain bid for dopamine hits from 'likes' and 'retweets'. But that's neither here nor there really. I could rant for a long time on that topic.
But, as you say, those sites seem to fulfil the requirements of the majority better than places where you can write in full paragraphs. We are the niche market.
I haven't entirely lost hope that Letterboxd might turn up with a solution. As I said in my first response, they've apparently thought about the idea, and its downsides, a goodish amount over the years. Maybe it's the itch that won't stop itching.
"We are the niche market."
This, definitely.
It IS dead, maybe 400 posters, not counting the2,000 I have on Ignore.
So many of the active posters are sub-adults who have the humor sense of a peach pit, and more than a few of them are redundant sock puppets, the internet analog of the blow-up sex doll.
The future has never looked good here. But, hey! N’yuk-N’yuk-N’yuk, y’all! Let’s meet in the woodshed! Someone has the hand lotion!