February 20th 2017. A date which will live in infamy. Why, you ask? I’ll tell you why. Donald Trump’s first tenure as president of the USA started on the 20th of January 2017. Exactly one month later Amazon closed down the IMDb message boards.
The IMDb message boards were a home to tens of thousands of movie fans. A place where anyone could discuss with other movie fans a movie they wanted to watch or that they had watched or were simply interested in. All you had to do was search for the movie on IMDb, click on it, scroll down, and you’d see that particular movie’s message board. The convenience of discussing on IMDb the movie you’d already be reading about on IMDb was enormous.
Screenshot taken using the FilmBoards browser extension that restores the old boards.
You would see existing threads and comments and you could join the conversation, or you could start your own thread. Sure, sometimes replies would come in a month or a year later, but that depended on how obscure the movie is. The less obscure, the more traffic that specific IMDb page gets, simple as that, but IMDb has tons of traffic, was the 51st most visited website on the internet in 2024 according to SEMrush. You would find activity even for an obscure film such as Albino aka The Night of the Askari aka Whispering Death from 1976, as shown below. I chose that as an example because after 35 years of IMDb, it doesn’t even have 350 ratings.
Screenshot from FilmBoards
Nerd fights were somewhat commonplace, but it was nothing like Reddit. Overall it was a good place to find kindred spirits.
One issue with the IMDb message boards - the issue that caused their demise - was that they weren’t there only for movies, but also for performers. You could discuss actors on their pages just as easily as movies. Which brings us to 2017. As soon as celebrities like Robert DeNiro and Meryl Streep publicly attacked the new American president, hundreds of angry Trump supporters flooded their IMDb boards with personal insults and attacks. Did I say that the IMDb message boards were completely unmoderated? Forgot to tell you that. My bad. As you can imagine, IMDb (a subsidiary of Amazon since 1998) suddenly had a hot potato on its hands. Amazon’s solution was simple: shut down the boards for good, the boards we had been using for 16 years. That’s akin to using a flamethrower to kill a few ants.
To quote H.G. Wells, this is how it felt to us long-time users: “this was no disciplined march; it was a stampede—a stampede gigantic and terrible—without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilization, of the massacre of mankind.”
Okay, so maybe that’s a bit over the top, but when you’re a genuine movie fanatic, where are you going to discuss an old obscure movie now? On some geek’s Facebook page? Do you wait a year and a half for the geek to post about the movie you just watched, so that you can then post a comment when, by then, you’ve stopped caring? Where are you going to find people who have even heard of obscure sci-fi, horror, action, revenge flicks? Let alone who have watched them?
It’s important to point out that the old defunct IMDb boards were copied and pasted into FilmBoards and MovieChat, which is an admirable effort to not let all those conversations vanish into the ether. And two years ago a kind soul created a fantastic browser extension that uses FilmBoards to transplant the old IMDb message boards onto the new IMDb. You can also post new comments, but unfortunately there just aren’t enough users on these sites (or any other forum for that matter) to work as it used to on IMDb.
Continues in PART 2
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