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Comment by chippy | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty bad move and here's why: IMDb relies on users using the site, editing entries, facts, quotes and correcting things.

These are the community, and they are movie fans, hardcore fans, the reason why IMDb continues. The "db" in IMDb has been created, by hand, by volunteers - the users who use the message board.

IMDb has totally overlooked the value of the Message Boards - they are for the community. Remove this and IMDb as a whole will suffer.

Consider this comparison: Imagine if Wikipedia said that it was only going to have Facebook logins for editors. All user pages were being deleted, no user meetups were allowed and no meta discussion about pages was allowed, but only that normal articles, the main thing non editors read were to be kept. Thats a stretched comparison - the idea is the the message boards are how the community works, not just some little addon that non community members don't use.

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All true. They've grown fat off user-created content, and are about to discover that their user base isn't that sticky and their database is easy to clone. AOL was once the biggest thing on the internet, and look at them now.

As a general matter, if you've ever wanted to disrupt an existing firm but have been unsure about whether it's practical to unseat an incumbent, times of economic and political uncertainty are absolutely the best environment to go about it. I don't think it's a coincidence that the first tech boom peaked at a time of (relatively minor) political crisis.

It would be like Y Combinator shutting down its "message board", citing "Increasingly, Y Combinator customers have migrated to Reddit"

If hacker news doesn't stem the growth of trolling (which has pushed out plenty of my friends) then it probably will eventually "shut down" new signups for a while.

Odd, I don't see a lot of blatant trolling on HN at all. Care to name some examples?

Really?

HN has the least trolls of any board I look at.

Can you provide examples?

I've seen almost no trolling here, it seems to get shut down pretty quickly.

Only time will tell if this is a good or bad decision. I bet they crunched the numbers and felt that they could save money by no longer needing to maintain a moderation staff, or potentially move that staff to more important projects.

Judging by the flame wars I've seen on IMDB, their moderation staff is small to non-existent.

IMDb relies on users using the site, editing entries, facts, quotes and correcting things.

Are you sure about this? My impression is that they rely on IMDBPro subscriptions.

They did in the beginning, not so much now I guess. The worst thing was when the removed all the actual writers from films and replaced them with the official writers, due to a deal with the WGA or similar.

This is probably the most insightful comment here.

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