I recommend anyone to use email aliasing and perhaps the Mullvad browser (if every fucking website using browser fingerprinting is getting a little tiring). These companies are just trying to suck up as much data as possible and ruin the web.
Email aliasing prevents spam or linking of your emails by giving you a seperate email address to give to each service. When that service inevitably leaks your data, the leaked address can be shut off if it is being spammed and won't be linked to your other accounts or identity for fishing and hacking.
DuckDuckGo has a free one with great integrations into Bitwarden as well as a standalone extension[1] for managing them. If you have iCloud+ Apple has an email aliasing service called Hidemyemail. There are also some good paid options here[2].
We complain when good sites are acquired and shut down, but maybe it's even worse when they're acquired and kept running in a shitty state like IMDB or Twitter. Big enough to stave off competition and prevent progress.
Until recently IMDB worked without javascript even. It's the onslaught from AI crawlers that is driving the current enshittification of the web. It's really accelerated in the last six months.
IMdb deleted all their message boards in 2017 [1], which also included ALOT of user reviews, more than the Reviews section on the site.
Fortunately MovieChat.org took up archiving as much as it could of the old content, and up to today providing the same 'style' of community engagement as the old boards. I wonder if they'll do the same for User Reviews.
There's even a userscript [2] that seamlessly puts an embed of the equivalent MovieChat board (if available) for each IMdb entry, right in the site section where the old IMdb boards used to be.
I assume you can make an account on MC and still participate in all those (their) boards.
I'll admit though-- probably like many, I came to the old IMdb boards just before the deletion, and to be honest they were kinda shitty. Sorry. Alot of trollposting and lack of seriousness when someone tried to have a serious discussion about some work. But it was overall and mostly Fun!
The MovieChat boards still have much of that old content - take a look and enjoy.
moviechat is OK for old movies with old discussions
after discussing and rating movies on IMDB I completely stopped and using it not logged in only to check rating in Google results and ocassionally to check reviews, now that reviews are gone I guess I should stop checking their reviews and ditch this site completely
It's a pity that MC and TMDB boards didn't become the equivalent of 'HN for visual media' and Reddit for the wider 'audience'. Today, Reddit is possibly the most popular site to read non-mainstream reviews.
You need an account to do anything nowadays. And to have an account on more and more platforms you must verify it with your age providing your face picture and/or ID. LLMs and their consequences accelerated but did not start this trend, and it's only going to get worse. Account fatigue, what must be a real phenomenon at this point, will also incentivize Google Sign-In and worse further impacting privacy and freedom. I don't see how it can get better from here.
Interestingly probably also soon true of reddit where this is posted, in the last few days they've been showing a "get the app to continue browsing" on the mobile site. It's possible for now to use desktop view still but clearly everyone is on the path towards "create an account to view user content".
Even if Reddit is still accessible from the browser, the discussion culture is already wrecked since the vast majority of people are on the mobile app. That interface encourages one-line posts instead of substantial discussion, and it will sometimes even hide a lot of posts (even when upvoted) from most users, so that one is just talking to the void. Look elsewhere for real community.
While recently there were many fake reviews, those were easy to skip and among the genuine reviews many were interesting, by clarifying whether a movie is worth viewing, depending on your interests, or sometimes by providing additional historical information, hard to find elsewhere.
Email aliasing prevents spam or linking of your emails by giving you a seperate email address to give to each service. When that service inevitably leaks your data, the leaked address can be shut off if it is being spammed and won't be linked to your other accounts or identity for fishing and hacking.
DuckDuckGo has a free one with great integrations into Bitwarden as well as a standalone extension[1] for managing them. If you have iCloud+ Apple has an email aliasing service called Hidemyemail. There are also some good paid options here[2].
[1]https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/qwacky/kieehbhdbinc...
[2] https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email-aliasing/
Fortunately MovieChat.org took up archiving as much as it could of the old content, and up to today providing the same 'style' of community engagement as the old boards. I wonder if they'll do the same for User Reviews.
There's even a userscript [2] that seamlessly puts an embed of the equivalent MovieChat board (if available) for each IMdb entry, right in the site section where the old IMdb boards used to be.
I assume you can make an account on MC and still participate in all those (their) boards.
I'll admit though-- probably like many, I came to the old IMdb boards just before the deletion, and to be honest they were kinda shitty. Sorry. Alot of trollposting and lack of seriousness when someone tried to have a serious discussion about some work. But it was overall and mostly Fun!
The MovieChat boards still have much of that old content - take a look and enjoy.
[1] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/IMDb#Message_boards
[2] https://greasyfork.org/scripts/27617-new-imdb-message-boards...
https://www.themoviedb.org
moviechat is OK for old movies with old discussions
after discussing and rating movies on IMDB I completely stopped and using it not logged in only to check rating in Google results and ocassionally to check reviews, now that reviews are gone I guess I should stop checking their reviews and ditch this site completely
MC still has active discussions on new releases e.g. https://moviechat.org/tt1341338/Good-Luck-Have-Fun-Dont-Die.
They even have a forum for computer games: https://moviechat.org/bd0000053/Video-Games
It's a pity that MC and TMDB boards didn't become the equivalent of 'HN for visual media' and Reddit for the wider 'audience'. Today, Reddit is possibly the most popular site to read non-mainstream reviews.
Maybe it'll spawn new interest in the fediverse.
While recently there were many fake reviews, those were easy to skip and among the genuine reviews many were interesting, by clarifying whether a movie is worth viewing, depending on your interests, or sometimes by providing additional historical information, hard to find elsewhere.