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Comment by roryisok | Hacker News Reader

Makes sense. I don't see what the big deal is, surprised to see this at the top of the front page? I had to double check I wasn't looking at /new

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IMDb is one of the biggest websites in the world, and they're deleting a large percentage of the content on their site. Seems front-page-worthy if only for the scale of the content being lost, whatever your view of the value of that content.

Messages are a tiny fraction of the content on their site.

their boards are pretty much only unique feature they offered, if i wanna information about movie, rate something or create my watchlist i have plenty of options

if i wanna discuss ANY movie i watched, i have ONE option which is being shut down in two weeks

which also means after shutting down boards i have no more reason to use their site and not switch to competition which i am already doing since i learned this news (deciding between TMDb and Trakt.tv at the moment, the latter one has even thread comments for each movie or TV show)

Ok, that's fair

On the low-volume boards for not-so-popular movies, I've found some of the posts incredibly valuable, and all of that is now going to be out of the reach of search engines.

What information are we going to lose when it's deleted? Will IMDB consider handing the data to the Internet Archive?

I'd argue we won't lose anything. IMDB message boards aren't exactly a trustworthy source of information.

Neither is HN for that matter, would you be as indifferent if HN decided to delete all comments?

I wouldn't be indifferent, but also I wouldn't defend keeping them in terms of having value outside of my sentimental affection for what I've written that's been up-voted.

What does being 'trustworthy' have to do with anything in this context?

Since they had rolling expiry of messages, based on what I've seen, a couple of years of forum posts for less popular movies, and a few months worth for more popular ones.

This seems unlikely. IMDB has always been extremely possessive of their dataset. Even in the shutdown notice, they take the effort to explicitly state "for personal use".

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