IMDb Has Had Enough Of Trolls And Is Killing Off Forums And Messaging

It’s been a long run, but after 16 years, IMDb is closing up shop on it’s forums and private messaging features. In a statement made on the site the company said

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.

New postings to the boards were disabled on the 3rd, but the existing content can still be accessed until February 20th to allow users to archive messages.

The site, used regularly by most fans of film and television (notably every time we forget the name of that one gal in that movie with the shark we pull out the IMDb mobile app), has seen a rapidly diminishing level of useful discourse in the forums. As with most open message boards on the internet, they’d long become a hotbed for harassment, racism, sexism, doxxing, and general poo-flinging.

Even a simple subject perusal for topics include such discourse worthy topics as:

Vegetarians are scumbags.
Spike Lee’s films were only ever loved by black SJWs.
Should girls now take initiative and ask guys out?
Janagolightly is a lonely depressed attention whore
RIP NAEEMAK THE FULL RETARD ANUS TROLL (1977-2017)

Overall use of the forums has been dropping over the last many years, especially as a ratio of useful to off-topic content, so the decision isn’t a huge surprise. IMDb’s statement does also note that much of the traffic had already moved to social networks. In the end, rather than trying to clean up and moderate the forums, which was never part of their core business model is a good choice. Now they can spend more resources focusing on expanding their directory and IMDbPro offerings.