As usual your impeccable investigative reporting completely missed how useful some of those boards were for foreign language films to US movie buffs. Some great discussion and exposure, but why say anything positive when that gets zero attention?

i rarely posted on them but i really loved them. it was always fun to visit them after watching a movie and see a thread of something you only half thought of like “What was up with the guy who held the door open??” then you sometimes get some insight you might not have .

I agree. Shitposters are always awful, but people who were there to actually have a conversation about the movie usually brought a lot to the table. I enjoyed even the more “out there” theories (moreso if they were well-explained), or explanations or insight into things that I either missed, or didn’t grasp as well as…

The imdb forums are pretty bad, but where else can you go to find an entire forum dedicated to any individual movie, actor, director, etc? This is a serious question—after I watch a movie and want to discuss theories, plot holes, clarifications, etc, what is out there other than the imdb forums?

But really, pot/kettle in the extreme...

Seriously. There’s a lot of garbage in the discussions under the recent blockbusters but for anything that’s not a hot Hollywood film or that’s older than the internet it’s been very useful.

newspapers in particular, the comment sections tend to just be the disgruntled/racist/classist/asshole mutterings that use to be confined to the poster’s own breakfast table or barstool, but now the comment section means they can subject the world to their opinions on every damn article in the paper.

This sucks! Yes are there are insane amounts of trolls (as there are all over the internet), but I always enjoyed going to the boards right after watching a movie to see what theories other people had about the movies plot. To be honest it was the main reason for me to go to IMDB in the first place. :(

If you’re going to just get a site on the uselessness of just a small portion of its content and pick and choose the worst it has to offer to convince people, then by those standards gizmodo should die an immediate death. I bet there’s more actual useless posts (not commenter a but actual articles) on gizmodo than…

I’ve been on since 2005. As I said here this is a lot more than just ditching comments. Besides the uses I mentioned the forums helped connect people who didn’t have a need for IMDBPro’s info, but wanted to speak with others in the entertainment realms about specific topics. Critics, film subject writers, bloggers,…

You know what? This is actually a loss in one very indispensable respect.

I agree. What’s the point of going there anymore? With Youtube and RT, is IMDB even necessary anymore? The people in the review section are mostly paid studio shills. 

I visit that site more than I visit this site. The comment section was actually good. You’ll actually get comments from people not paid to write reviews(cough tech sites). Amazon is shutting it down because they need to get people to watch their garbage in Prime Movies. Once they put the IMDB score in their new UI, it…

Agree. I never posted there, but often visited for exactly those reasons, especially “what the fuck just happened?” I’ll actually miss them.

While the great majority of the IMDB message board comments are depressing garbage, I’ve found some genuinely useful, thought-provoking stuff there from time-to-time. Specifically with deeply symbolic films like some of the Coen Brothers and Michael Haneke stuff.

I’m not so sure about that. For one thing, it helps to keep insane people preoccupied on the computer where they can’t hurt anyone. They’re free to spew their nonsense online instead of being out here among the rest of us. Comment sections act as a pressure relief valve for the psychos in society - it’s a public…

It was great for spoilers for smaller movies, and a stop along the path of trying to figure out what the “fuck just happened” in weirder or ”someone decided to be a prentious shit out of left field” movies