Guest post by The news is that after 15 years the IMDb is closing down its message boards, but the story is their creation in the first place: a tale of Apache, mod_perl, PostgreSQL, C, and XEMacs, all served up on a BeOS bun in a Bristol-area cafeteria; of missed deadlines, missed opportunities and misplaced innocence given the scale of comments, comment spam and trolling up to that point. Brought to you by Colin M. Strickland, a developer whose CV has long read “you can blame me for the message boards” (and yes, he does go by the initials cms).
It’s really a shame about shutting down those boards, but I imagine moderating them must’ve been a nightmare, with all the trolls and douchebags who inevitably show up to the party. It’s just another example of why we can’t have nice things.
That is a HUGE understatement. While I only casually browsed, silently, out of (morbid) curiosity, things had really devolved in recent years.
It was a P.R. nightmare because every actor/actress was constantly under attack, almost always for off-topic (political, religious, private/personal, etc.) reasons. I’ll bet the lawyers got involved. It really was that bad, and it wasn’t just harmless opinions but full-on libel, hate speech, and even character assassination.
Seriously, there’s just no other way to view it. It was a tool (mis)used to piss others off and destroy people’s reputations. Of course you can’t exactly avoid or fix that, the Internet is too big, but it just attracted the wrong crowd. It wasn’t for movie fans to discuss their favorite shows but moreso for angry and dejected psychos with an axe to grind.
Seriously, it was VERY easy to find such contentious discussions. I don’t know if it’s the era we live in or what, but the world has really lost it’s marbles, everyone is angry and almost encouraged to attack others. It’s impossible not to pity some people who live under such heavy public scrutiny.
Rugxulo,
I think it depends a lot on the target audience. I would think some are inherently more mature, I’m thinking back to the dice job boards for IT professionals. It was nice to be able to hold discussions with other professionals like myself. While there were disagreements in the community, for many years it operated smoothly enough IMHO.
In the end, that community was ruined too, but it wasn’t because of what you’d think. Dice themselves hired some evangelical “moderators” to steer the discussions and this was when the community really devolved. They decided freedom of speech wasn’t in their interests, they even banned me for asking why they were censoring innocent posters who had not violated any TOS. Eventually the entire board got taken down because their own moderation ruined it.
I’ve never had to moderate a community, I guess it’s hard to strike a balance. I probably wouldn’t be a good moderator because I like to be involved in the discussion
I think it’s best to have very light moderation, although on huge public boards where there are thousands/millions of users, I don’t suppose there’s any easy solution.
Moderating for a large audience is almost impossible. I like how Slashdot had people which had high scores be able to do some moderation. I like the idea, not sure if it always had a good effect.
Lennie,
Stack exchange does it too based on a point system, but I feel it has encouraged group think and confirmation bias, which isn’t so good for users who want well rounded answers. Frequently some questions that are exactly what I’m looking for (and I’m sure many others) are closed down. Sometimes the moderators close the entire topic because of allegedly poor quality answers, even when the questions and answers were all relevant from an independent point of view. I get the impression that the moderators closed the topic simply because they disagreed and not necessarily because the answers were bad. Of course sometimes the answers are bad, but I feel the down-voting is far more appropriate than shutting down the topic.
They usually ban questions that ask the pros and cons between multiple choices, aka “which is better”, but this is actually very useful information as long as the choices are all well represented.
They do well at keeping out spam and harassment, but I also have some disappointment that the moderation shuts down some good viewpoints.
Man there were a lot of typos in my comment. 🙁
You are right, and my advice would be: moderation should be done in moderation. 🙂
Opinions and things which are clearly wrong should not be voted down or closed down.
What is clearly wrong should be pointed out why it’s wrong. It might turn out you, if you are that moderator, are wrong and the person can actually explain why.
Even an other opinion can help you understand something about other the motivation, etc. from other people.
Edited 2017-02-17 14:01 UTC
People have always been angry. The anonymity of the Internet just gives them an outlet to vent. You want to stop the trolls and hate speech? Then make real identities on the Internet mandatory. I think that’s the only way to accomplish it, because asking them nicely ain’t gonna do shit.
WorknMan,
I don’t know about that, there are plenty of people being overtly hateful in real life with no anonymity at all.
Secondly, I usually refuse to sign up with a real identity because I object to being tracked more than absolutely necessary. For sites requiring mandatory info, I sign up with garbage information. Judge me if you want, but when employers or anybody looks me up, what I do/say in my private life is none of their damned business!
I’m not judging you at all. I’m just saying either we don’t have anonymity, or we have trolls and hate speech. And spam. And douchebags in general.
Sorry, but trolls and douchebags are pretty much a fact of life at this point. They always have been, you just don’t have as much choice in dealing with them now, unless there are ignore buttons.
The Internet on the other hand should allow anonymity. I agree with the other person, I tend to put in garbage information if a page tries to ask for it. Even Facebook I use a fake name, they don’t need to know all my info. Not even sure at what point people decided that putting their personal life up on the Internet was a good idea…. I’ve always thought of it like the Old West, without all the smells.
Yes, but the anonymity of the Internet gives them an outlet they wouldn’t otherwise have. Now, if you think anonymity is worth putting up with the trolls, I think that’s a perfectly valid position. I’m just trying to make people understand that they’re going to have to choose between the two.
WorknMan,
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of either of our positions though. We don’t believe anonymity is the primary cause or outlet for bullying. I think hateful rhetoric starts at home and in schools right in the open with parents who don’t do anything to stop it. They might even be spreading it themselves. By the time they are social network users, their behavior becomes an extension of what they are already doing in real life.
I don’t know what the solution is, but even if you hold the opinion that eliminating anonymity would stop it, I don’t think that is really feasible. How would you actually pull this off?
Edited 2017-02-15 20:33 UTC
Beats the shit out of me, but there is no other solution. You either find some way to unmask these people, or they’re always going to be a PITA. I know you’re probably tempted to say, ‘Well, we should tell parents to teach their kids better…’ In my case, my father was MIA and my mother was always too drunk to care. At least in the US, the family unit has been disintegrated, and this is one of the results. The only reason I wasn’t a terror online is because I didn’t have Internet access before I matured.
Edited 2017-02-16 02:11 UTC
WorknMan,
Then I take it your intention is for this solution to be an argumentative device rather than proposing it to be a serious solution that could really work? If so, that’s kind of what we’re saying too, there’s no way for it to accomplish the stated goals.
Edited 2017-02-16 12:01 UTC
Well, you have a point that some people are still going to be assholes, even with their real names attached, although I imagine many would not. And even for the ones that would, if their identity could be verified, they could be prosecuted for making death threats (or whatever) and/or kept from simply making another anonymous account and continue trolling.
There were never any douchbags in the BeOS community. or i have been very, very lucky.
There was that obelix guy…
LULZ
More like LACK of moderation.
A handful of accounts have been doing most of the posting. Not all trolls either, just some really lonely people using the boards as their personal chat rooms.
Something simple like limiting how many posts an account can make per day would have helped out quite a bit.
What? World Wide Web is invented in 1989! He thinks he knows everything so he didn’t even bother to look it up for a few seconds.
Yay! You’ve completely blown apart the entire story with one simple fact! Oh but hang on…
So great, yes. Tim “invented” the World Wide Web by writing a paper about it in 1989, but nobody else could use it until 1991. So the original article is entirely correct; 1989 pre-dated the web by a couple of years.
Even by 1995, when I started using Mosaic for the web, most of my net time was still spent on USENET. Waiting for those damned jpegs to display line by line…
Ah, I miss those days!
What, no gopher, or fsp?
Slacker.
I spent plenty of time gophering around the early internet. Gopher, USENET, and FreeNets were the ish back then.
Of course AOL, CompuServe, and apple’s sparsely populated eWorld were out back then.
There was still an active BBS community too, I would sometimes dial those things up to chat and trade stuff.
No, I wasn’t into gophers…
I have a bridge they might be interested in. We all know which movie the SJWs had a shitfit over anyone disagreeing with their virtue signaling over (Ghostbusters 2016) and pretty much anyone and anything that didn’t toe the party line were attacked.
Several reviewers even expressed they were afraid to review the movie for fear of attack after seeing what happened to Angry Video Game Nerd (who simply said he won’t go see any crappy Hollywood remakes) who got doxxed and calls for someone to go kill him and his family. I close with a forum post by a user on that very same message board who frankly said it better than I ever could..
“Really now? His very politely expressed opinion that the film was poor? That’s why this board is closing? Politely stated opinions you don’t agree with?
Good lord you’re insufferable. Whomever you are. Hershey, Hestia, whichever pathetic tantrum-throwing whiner. In the 15 years I’ve used IMDb there have always been trolls and makers of offence, and it never stopped me from having solid conversations about film and perusing information or perspectives I’d not have found otherwise. I never thought the chaff was worth more than roll of my eyes, on some occasions a chuckle, and on very rare occasion a click of the report button.
While I am sure the general boards may well have become more vile — they were never bastions of internet etiquette and so I avoided them — the trolls were never a real problem until thin-skinned, melodramatic ninnies like yourself came along. Good riddance. ”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1289401/board/nest/265922738?ref_=tt_bd…
That is perfection!
I actually refused to see the new Ghostbusters for the same reason, we really should boycott Hollywood remakes of 1980s shows. Just watch the damn 1980s movie, it will always be better. The next director/producer that gets drunk watching a fantastic movie and thinks ‘I could do that story better.’ deserves a bomb.
I think it was after the Spielberg / Tom Cruise War of the Worlds that I started thinking that remakes need to end. Then they started ‘but it’s a reboot!’ and it got more terrible… then while watching the new Total Recall, and all I could think was “I should be watching the one with Arnie….”
…as it was that much harder for them to read the undulations of their fans that feds them, siphoning the life force out of the youth to keep the Hollywood demi-gods young.
It won’t last long though…they’ll soon figure out another means to devour their victims in order to maintain their status and control over society
A good place for movie discussion and user reviews is the Facebook group “The Cinefiles”.