The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Letterboxd | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Letterboxd

statsignificant.com

42 pointsspeckx24 comments

> On Letterboxd, the reviews can be as entertaining as the movies themselves.

Hard disagree here. There are some good reviewers on there but you have to wade through a mountain of terrible one-liners from wannabe comedians. No matter how many of these users I block there are always more of them popping up. I wish they had a character or sentence length filter for reviews that could be toggled on, for those of us who aren't looking for a "Twitter for movies" experience.

The only solution is following/friending people who write thoughtful reviews as well as going through their friends if the number is low.

Also if you go to esoteric enough films you mostly filter out the joke reviews

My strategy has been to follow accounts that just repost reviews by well respected film critics, usually older ones like Stanley Kauffman or Pauline Kael. Typically they're well written even if I disagree with the take, and they avoid the overwriting problem that even the more thoughtful Letterboxd users are prone to (easier to write a long, rambling review than a concise one). But those accounts get taken down occasionally, usually don't have any reviews for more recent movies, and have spotty coverage even for older movies.

There's not much Letterboxd does that cannot be federated. For one, their metadata database is a near full replica of TMDB, with very minor exceptions such as retaining deleted TMDB media. I'm not opposed to Letterboxd dying if it means people consider an alternative that is less fragile.

The value of many platforms is not the database or the stack, but the community on it. People use Letterboxd because their friends are there and because actors and directors have their lists and ratings there.

I'm well aware, my hope is that people eventually decide to move to a more independent platform.

Is the statement in the linked article that "The Internet Movie Database functions as a loss leader for the e-commerce giant" backed up somewhere?

IMDB offers both Pro Subscriptions. IMDB offers data licenses that the company claims are licensed "to a wide selection of businesses including movie studios, cable companies, websites, video retailers, software developers, electronics manufacturers, mobile applications, and more."[1]

IMDB offers advertising and has 250M visitors per month.[2]

None of these point to the likelihood that IMDB is a loss leader.

1 = https://help.imdb.com/article/imdb/general-information/conte... 2 = https://advertising.amazon.com/channels/imdb

It was initially purchased as a vehicle to drive customers to Amazon's DVD sales business. I think it's monetized itself pretty well since then, though.

It now drives the "actors in this scene" feature in Amazon Prime.

Is there a viable watch-list alternative to Letterboxd? All I want is a place to save movies/shows that people recommend to me + it telling me what streaming service it’s available on.

Their "where is it" data is from https://www.justwatch.com/ maybe that site has its own watchlist feature?

The Sofa App (https://sofahq.com) is great if you're on iOS & Mac. It has movie, show, and book meta data for keeping track of recommendations.

why don't we kill off Goodreads instead! Bad UI, confusing, poor features, toxic users. Letterboxd is harmless, anyone could vibecode a replacement in a day and a half.

hardcover.app is a great alternative. I switched early last year and have been very happy with it

cool, thx for the tip!

The TL;DR is that the VC/PE firm that owns 60% of Letterboxd is selling their stake in the company and some people are panicking because they don't want it purchased by a VC/PE firm.

There's a crowdfunding campaign trying to raise $100,000 to make an offer to buy the site for some public governance structure, with no explanation of how they're going to get the money to buy Letterboxd.

This could be interesting if the group asking for $100,000 had any plausible plan at all to fund their purchase, but if there is such a plan I can't find it.

50 people, $2200 each, raise under Reg-CF? Just need the 50 people. Or if they are acredited then Reg504 or 506 and a Delaware LLC.

The $100K was for doing the work to make the offer to buy Letterbox.

This offer need to somehow include something like $160M.

The comment you're replying to pointed out that there is no explanation how this money will be raised. "50 people, $2200 each" does not cover it.

This seems to completely miss one of the main selling points of Letterboxd - unlike IMDB its UI isn't dogshit.

I get what you mean and it's certainly true, but he UI of either product can be simplified or bloated in a quarter by infra/development.

The real value of letterbox'd is it's community and "pop culture" relevance. I think that will drive the purchase more than anything

great website but i had to sign out of at least three separate newsletters so far - if i wasn't already so disillusioned by modern technology, that would have made me delete my account.

This too shall be enshittified

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