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Comment by Chathamization | Hacker News Reader

> Let's say a new TV show starts airing, and you really like it and want to discuss it more. You can probably bet there's a subreddit for it, and in that community, a ton of people interested in it.

Before someone could go to the IMDB forums and discuss it. I think they did the job a lot better - if you found a conversation about a particular episode and wanted to comment on it a few weeks after it was made, you could and the topic would come back to the top. With Reddit (and Hacker News), if you're late to the party no one is going to see your comment because the topic is already buried.

Reddit's large variety of user created communities as well as anonymous handles make the site pretty useful. But in terms of the format of the communities, I think the old style of forums were much more conducive to actual ongoing conversations.

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I didn't know IMDB even had forums. And they're gone.

IMDB forums required signing up to even read threads, if memory serves. Every now and then I'd try to figure out where else I'd seen some actor, notice an interesting sounding topic at the bottom of the page, click on it, be told I had to register in order to read, and then get annoyed and leave.

Note to companies: Don't do crap like this. Let people lurk. If they like the content then they'll create an account. Forcing them to create an account before they're even allowed to read comments is is sure-fire way to fail.

I'm looking at you, Quora!

I noticed quora also started forcing you to use their app instead of the mobile site. Since they did that I just stopped reading the news feed completely. I used to read it every day.

I think IMDB is a good example of why registration is a good thing: discussions on there were of very high quality and I learned a lot about a given movie by combing through them. You would have to have a subreddit for every movie out in order to come close to replicating that experience on Reddit, and it seems registration kept a lot of the riff-raff out.

I've been a member on IMDB since the end of '90s, and I've seen high quality discussions and low quality discussions on IMDB. I think it goes too far to say that either is dominant. I can say though that controversial / politics related subjects likely create low quality discussion whereas clever movie plots generate high quality discussions. At least, that's my perception/experience of it. We both got our data point of experience, and that's it. We need some kind of data / analysis to get to a more coherent, unbiased viewpoint.

There's a difference between requiring an account to lurk and requiring one to post messages

I’ll bet that this is primarily not because of registration but primarily because of topic constraints- you can only discuss movies.

And I’m guessing there was some problem, which is why they shut the forums down.

IMDB forums were fantastic. I still have plenty of posts/comments on there. But if they're now gone, that's sad

They got bizarrely toxic toward the end. It was always a mixed bag, with weird comments by seemingly unstable people, but many well-written and insightful comments, too. Over the last couple of years, as I recall, it became a hotbed of weird, political comments. Lots of posts like "Typical LIBERAL agenda nonsense!" and lots of outright toxic, inflammatory replies to completely ordinary questions.

I'd love to know what group targeted IMDB, because it's the most successful takeover I've ever seen.

Archived here: https://filmboards.com/

I just noticed that I submitted an imdb comment/review in March of this year. The boards still look up. Did something change?

The discussions on IMDB forums seemed almost universally on-topic and in-depth. I learned a lot about various movies by combing those forums... subreddits do not even come close.

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