A few words about Message Boards
As you may know IMDB, the largest Internet site for movie&TV business decided to take down one of the oldest part of its site – Message Boards. Message Boards exist since 1999 and are simple forums – the place where people talk, discuss, interact. There are many sections but the most vital part are sections on the films, TV series, shows and games. So every movie, every show, every game has its own message board. These forums have an engaged and dedicated community that keeps them alive and active. Some people come to msg boards every day, leave dozens of posts, some only read them – but once you start to do this, to read message boards after every film you watch, it’s hard to stop.
The Announcement
On 3rd of February IMDB announced to us, IMDB users that they decided to close the Message Boards. The outrage that message has caused is enormous. People are furious, angry and desperate. They are begging, asking, threatening. Despite IMDB claims that the community is small, a large number of users have already expressed their objection. IMDB offered Facebook and Twitter as substitutes - that is a real joke - but since they did that, hundreds of users went to IMDB’s facebook page and expressed their feelings. IMDB publishes 4-5 posts on Facebook every day ignoring users’ voice but during these couple of days under each of these posts we had 70-100 comments relating only to message boards and none to the post content. After 4 days we have thousands of people saying “no, please, don’t do this, message boards are the only reason I come to IMDB”, including those still posting on message boards, and we have 10k signatures under two petitions to stop closing message boards. The explanation offered by IMDB is usual corporate BS sounding like this:
“After in-depth discussion and examination, we have concluded that IMDb's message boards are no longer providing a positive, useful experience for the vast majority of our more than 250 million monthly users worldwide. The decision to retire a long-standing feature was made only after careful consideration and was based on data and traffic.”
So why?
During the discussion with the IMDB contributors (the users that contribute to the site content) that demanded real explanation of that move, CEO of IMDB Col Needham said that software the msg boards are running on is too old and there's no economic sense to migrate them to a newer one. Trolls are another big excuse for this decision although IMDB has never tried to use volunteer moderators. And there are many people ready to do this job, many have volunteered.
The main reason given to justify this decision is the size of the community that uses the boards. CEO is speaking of a “tiny” group. But it’s not hard to find in Internet his own words from a few years ago when he was speaking about 250 billion of page views per year only for the boards. 250 billion annually gives us 7 million per day. This tiny community must be extremely productive.
Communication is not welcome
So we’re in the situation where on 20th of February IMDB is going to take down the most important feature for users, one that is completely unique, and wipe out 18 years of discussions, theories, analysis created by users - without even archiving it. So one thing is damaging the users’ content, another - taking away the unique and vital feature of the site, one that allowed users to communicate and be the actual community, not a bunch of individuals.
The text below is addressed to IMDB CEO Col Needham and Amazon CEO (Amazon owns IMDB) Jeff Bezos.
To Col Needham and Jeff Bezos
So you, you Internet giants, you grow on us, on our backs, your users, you would never be what you are without millions of users around the world. Not your engineers, not your board, not your CEO – we are the bone of this business. And yet you decide to kill the most important feature for us – the feature of communication. We are humans, not bots, our main need is to interact, be social, to communicate with other humans. Internet wasn’t invented for buying, shopping and advertising, don’t you know? Internet was invented by a human for communication with other humans. And you are taking this all down and you think that we will be happy to stay on your site just for encyclopedia information. That your contributors will be so devoted, so engaged just to be able to read cold content. You think that people will want to contribute to this page with their knowledge and passion getting nothing in exchange? We’re not bots, not yet at least, we still have emotions, we need to interact.
You really don’t understand. And you will fail. You will lose this game. Maybe your metrics will not be hit at the very first moment, maybe your revenue will be stable but this is the beginning of your end. You will see. And we are heart-broken. Because it didn’t have to be this way. People were ready to work for you FOR FREE, people were ready to moderate. You will pay the ultimate price for your arrogance.
People are saying that this is like razing Internet Parthenon to the ground or bombing Alexandria library but this is more – you decided to nuke our community with the special kind of bomb. It will not kill us, it will not erase our profiles, we, individual will be preserved. But it will erase all the relations between us. Just puf! and they don’t exist on the site anymore. It will be like Orwell’s 1984 where people didn’t talk to each other from fear. We won’t talk to each other because you’re going to destroy the tool of communication. We’ll be millions of individuals on your site, floating in loneliness. This is how it ends. This is lose-lose game.