IMDB used to be independent and have a pretty amazing forum for movies. Like people would have lots of debate and discussion and insight. I loved going there after watching a movie. It was sort of “secondary literature” and nothing like this existed before. Then they just decided to delete countless contributions and shut it down. Instead of paying for moderation for the few trolls.

Of course there are plenty of other movie forums, some even copies the old posts and there is r/movies, but it’s much more fractured now. There are certain network effects for social media that need to reach a critical size.