This is when you Really miss the old IMDB message boards

It doesn't seem like there will ever be such a densely concentrated area of people who enjoyed discussing movies than the old IMDB forums. I do wonder where most of them went after its dissolution. Maybe Reddit?

IMDB must have had thousands of users actively engaging any and all threads. Even if you made a post somewhere obscure, it would not be uncommon to receive at least a few replies within a week or two.

If you contrast that to here where certain topics get no traction, it explains why most users tend to congregate in the general section.

Funny you should mention that. Stranger Things was certainly blowing up during Season 4 mania. Active for at least the first two pages. So some big shows still get that same kind of buzz.

I recall the boards were very active right up until end, particularly when compared to here. A show like this would have 50 posts a day.

The boards weren't ghost towns at all, they were packed. It was just too big of a job to delete all the hateful and inappropriate stuff. I guess they thought the payoff in traffic wasn't worth the effort.

And Twitter is terrible for discussing things. A permanent message board like this is far more appropriate for talking about movies, where people see them at different times.

While I wouldn't say they were ghost towns I did notice drops in some of the boards I was using compared to years before. It's like the Sports board, I remember when that at its peak had a very full and active live thread for the Superbowl every year. Towards the end there was basically nothing.

All these chat sites/forums/messageboards have suffered similar. They have their peaks but eventually people move on, mainly because there are so many other new sites and social media platforms to pull them away.

The IMDb boards were never a ghost town that I noticed. I, as well, was using them from the mid-2000s up until the end (almost strictly on individual pages, as I didn't use the general boards all that much) and I never noticed any big slowing down of anything. And I wasn't exactly hanging out at boards of big shows or currently-popular movies (in fact, I avoided the boards of bigger shows and movies because they were so active that your post/thread would usually get lost in the chaos).

The IMDb boards were (ostensibly) closed due to the "toxic" environment presented by trolls and allegedly bigotted threads and posts (I suspect it's not a coincidence that this was occurring at the exact moment in time when everything started to become considered "toxic", "racist", "sexist", and "homophobic"). I never noticed these myself, however, but, as I said, I steered clear of the more hype boards usually. I believe that was where the more trollish stuff was located.

I never once had difficulty, however, having a question quickly answered anywhere, or having a theory get looked at/intelligently criticized, having my posts almost immediately acknowledged, or anything like that. I never noticed any major slowing down.

Reddit is cringe AF. I would rather not go there .

I always felt that was a nonsense excuse. The boards had the same percentage of trolling as anywhere else. I think the movie and show producers didn't like the ability to easily shit on their product. The female Ghostbusters is a perfect example. It was terrible, and word spread very quickly how bad it was. The producers blamed male toxicity, but the movie was very poorly received.