Used to go to:
- Look up cast lists
- Read the forums on trailers
Now:
- The cast list is obfuscated and harder to navigate
- The forums were removed
I use TMDB now
Tmdb is a much nice experience than IMDb. Site loads way quicker, there’s no irrelevant articles and ads plastered all over every page, and not owned by billionaire ghouls. I hope it stays exactly the way it is for many years.
Thank you, Amazon!
I was an ImDB user for over 20 years and always to lazy to search for an alternative - even though I was dreading the development in the recent years.
But NOW I finally switched!
Goodbye ImDB! Hello tmdb.org!
Oh no, not the user reviews!
I love it when the trash takes itself out
ENSHITIFICTION
ENSHIGIFICTION
As opposed to enshigi non-fiction?
Their design, layout and navigation are fucking terrible.
It began as crowd sourced database that became enshittified even before Amazon bought it.
It was cool up until the mid-1990s.
Most people weren’t even on the internet yet in the mid-90s so I’m curious about what kind of enshittification of IMDB did you see in the late 90s? That’s the time I remember it being good still but I don’t really recall when the horrible redesigns started occurring.
IMDB started out on USENet. Early versions were text files people edited and shared.
The mid to late nineties is when it became commercialized once it gained popularity on the WWW. People were pissed at them for taking all of the crowd sourced data and profiting from it.
Then it has no value to casual browsers, which is probably a majority of their visits. No ones signing up for that shit (i hope)
I agree they have no value. Most of the ones I’ve read have been pretending like they’re Siskel or Ebert using an LLM to write some excessively long review just to get likes and climb the influencer ladder.
Its a shame i really enjoyed the brainrot of seeing assorted yokels prattle on about how project hail mary is an evil woke movie that brainwashed them into being gay and also had too much dialogue and too much emotion and they skipped through everything that wasn’t a shot of the CG ships flying around
Who cares? The reviews are the worst part of IMDB. I use it to verify facts of a movie - year, actors, director, etc. I have no interest in the weird opinions that end up on IMDB.
The only time I cared about reviews on imdb was this one guy who had a absolutely ludicrous amount of porn reviews and looked exactly like the type of person to have a ludicrous amount of porn reviews.
Exactly. This is a non issue. Like being upset you have to sign into Next Door to see Doris down the street complain about things.
It’s probably something about protecting against mass scraping, right? Or direct AI click throughs.
Uses Neodb instead.
Aren’t there some alternative movie rating databases?
no boomers allowed
Fediverse has NeoDB
I’d suggest NeoDB too. It is great for keeping track of not just movies but also books, video games, music and books. https://eggplant.place/ is one of the main instances.
For getting recommendations and looking at ratings I do also like Movielens.
Letterboxd is where it’s at
Letterboxd is more like a social media for movies instead of a user movie review site.
Are there any good alternatives anyone can recommend?
Do you think it’s a prelude to in a year or so wanting age verification on accounts?
I’ve been using Letterboxd for a while now and am pretty happy with it.
My only issue with letterboxd is they pull from TheMovieDB for metadata/director verification and TMDB has some exclusionary/gatekeeping policy where they don’t consider films released primarily on Youtube eligible. This has fucked over indie directors like Joel Haver. I think his fans have manually intervened but no policy has changed that I know of.
Bummer that they do that. Any platform that you can recommend that addresses that issue and is user-friendly?
On NeoDB, you can create entries yourself, as well as import from various sources: IMDb, TMDB, Letterboxd, Douban etc
Thanks for the link!
You’re welcome :)
Seems to be a push from Amazon (they own IMDB if you didn’t know) to enshitify user reviews across the board. They’re doing it on Amazon for some items as well, but even worse.
User reviews are a hinderance to the corporate narrative, so no more user reviews
