By Rachel Meghan
I had a lot of unconventional crushes when I was a kid. When I was in middle school in the mid-aughts, the object of my affection was Freddie Highmore, a young actor known then for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Spiderwick Chronicles. Because he was a niche interest of mine, there was only one place I could go to meet fellow fans: the IMDB message boards.
It became a compulsion for me. I’d get home from school, go on my desktop computer, and check what was new on the Freddie Highmore IMDB board. I made the transition from tween to teen while frequenting these forums. They opened my mind to the internet, during an era where the web was an open frontier of barebones HTML blogs, now-forgotten search engines like Hotbot or Lycos, and communities like Yahoo! groups, listservs, and others formats of digital congregation. I had experience in chat rooms and forums, but there was something different about IMDB, a subsidiary of Amazon since the late 90s. Something reckless, something a little unhinged. There were real fans like me who were just there to discuss our favorite actors, but there were also many, many trolls. I felt vigilant battling them as a young tween, like I was an internet superhero.
Once I hit high school, I forgot about the IMDB message boards. I didn’t check them for years. Now, I’m 32, and long past the era in my life where I fangirl over celebrities (although I was a fan of The Good Doctor, Freddie Highmore’s ABC medical drama). Recently, I wanted to see what became of the IMDB message boards, if they still existed.
The announcement of the boards’ closures was made on February 3rd, 2017, giving users two weeks to archive whatever posts they wanted for personal use. The boards no longer provided a “positive, useful experience” for their users, and as someone who was familiar with the boards firsthand, I know that meant the trolls, the ones I was so eager to slay at age 12. Where can movie and celebrity stans go now? Letterboxd, the app where people just try to write funny one liners in lieu of a film review? Definitely not the same.
The IMDB message boards had over 250 million users worldwide. The forums were vast and endless- every single profile on IMDB, film or film professional alike, had their own message board. You could talk to fans of the most niche film, the most unknown actor, any subject you could think of. It was perfect for the neurodivergent among us, the ones who have an interest in something or someone that others didn’t. Now, users who want to post their insights on a film are encouraged to post on other sections of the site, such as in the reviews or trivia columns.
But user's lost more than forum posts. IMDB also shutdown the private messaging system, destroying potentially years of private correspondence.
It’s no surprise to me either that the messaging system would be discontinued as well. Thanks to the messaging system, I was a part of a small clique of fans on my chosen message board. There were three of us- one was a troubled girl my age, and the other was a 40 year old man. Nothing inappropriate happened, but this man knew our ages and continued to message us, telling us how mature we were and how well-versed we were in films. What he was doing on a board for a child actor filled with other children, I don’t even want to think too hard about.
The platform Sprinklr hosts what are the closest modern-day alternatives to the IMDB message boards. But Sprinklr's discussions tend to focus more on the IMDB platform itself, rather than individual films or actors. If you're feeling nostalgic, the website MovieChat.org has archived a number of the threads from the original IMDB message boards, with over three million posts preserved at the time of writing.
But what was so bad about IMDB? How unhealthy were these message boards that they had to be shut down for good, due to their toxicity? I have a distinct memory of reading an interview with Vanessa Hudgens, who was then known for High School Musical. She claimed in the interview that she read some online comments, but avoided IMDB because it was “too harsh”. I’m inclined to agree with her; in my fangirl days, I saw a lot of weird comments and trolls on IMDB.
Any given actor’s IMDB page was inundated with trolls. The ones I frequented had their fair share, but it got scary when one day, they started impersonating other fans. I logged in one day to find posts from a troll who had a mirror of my screen name, one letter off, saying awful things that I wouldn’t dare to post on the internet. These impersonators would follow me to all of the boards I frequented, posting libel and hate on all of my favorite actors and films’ boards. I wasn’t the only one, and it became a war of trolls versus fans. Why did they do it? I’ll never know, I guess. But my favorite boards became drowned with trolls. We’d try to report them, but they’d multiply. There were no real moderators to control them.
The general IMDB boards, the ones not targeted to a specific movie or actor, seemed to encourage this behavior. There would be truth or dare threads, where users would dare other users to go to various boards and troll in different ways. Something about the site drew in this kind of behavior, and it didn’t look like it would stop anytime soon. What started out as a fun place to discuss movies, actors, and the art of cinema instead became a lawless and at times genuinely scary place. Sound familiar?
Over the years we've seen a broader decay of social media, in large part thanks to either lax, nonexistent, or arguably openly hostile moderation. According the NBC News, the CSAM floodgates have been open on Elon Musk's "X" since 2023. Accounts claiming to sell CSAM were still on the social network as of summer 2025. Meta shows a similar complete lack of care, doling out limitless AI-generated videos of horrific child abuse. On the less brazenly horrifying side of social media's poor moderation, Garbage Day's Ryan Broderick noted the newest shortform video trend: AI generated thirst traps stealing entire sets from real-life comedians. As Broderick notes, "this is the direction social video is going. Will you accept the slop or finally log off?"
This was the direction the IMDB message boards headed into years ago: a hands-off moderation philosophy that welcomed and encouraged the dregs of the internet. The boards became bad news all around, never to recover, with the lack of moderation serving as a permission slip to delve into hate-filled anarchy if for no other reason than the lulz.
According to IMDB, the reason for shutting down the boards was due to “data and traffic”. However, because the internet is and always has been overrun by people who think they can post whatever they want and get away with it (and do), it became clear that the site required a 24/7 moderation system, clearly not something Amazon or literally any other modern tech company has ever wanted to shell out for. There's not enough money in having a healthy internet space.
Nowadays, many former IMDB users use Reddit to get their film discussion, but at the same time, lament the loss of individual movie boards. No one is arguing that the exchanges on these retired boards frequently veered towards the unpleasant, the unsettling, just like my experience with the impersonating trolls and grooming forty year olds. It was an early sign of what was to come. While the internet was always a lawless space, we have reached the point where anything and everything can happen, with no incentive to stop it. Why would Meta stop scammers from buying ads on their platforms so long as the checks for the ad spends clear? They wouldn't because kicking scammers off the platform would cost Meta billions of dollars. Similarly, why pay for robust moderation of the IMDB message boards--a feature that's never going to see a return on investment--when you can just shut them down instead?
The boards are not entirely forgotten. Browser extensions and add-ons exist to restore archived threads or inject discussions from other film forums onto IMDB pages. A quick search through r/movies shows a thread of users missing the boards. “It still hurts,” one user commiserates, speaking of the many hours they spent on message boards for older, niche movies that you just can’t find on Reddit. Though others called the boards "total chaos" and "fucking terrible."
For me, a former kid who was groomed and harassed on these boards, I have no real desire to go back. I prefer to let the IMDB message boards stay dead and buried, not wanting to resurrect the lawlessness, the beast that the bigwigs at IMDB had to take out back and shoot once it got too diseased due to their own lacking stewardship and care. While I miss being able to talk with others about my niche special interests, forums are just something that I have no desire to revisit.
In the age of declining literacy and more empowered trolls in this modern era that encourages cruelty on the internet, what IMDB showed us was what happens when people are given the shroud of anonymity and a lawless platform where anything can happen, thanks to the severe lack of moderation taken by the people up top.
Where else can movie buffs go? Many would say Letterboxd or Reddit, but both kind of serve as their own brand of popularity contests, not the socialist landscape of IMDB where everyone was on equal playing ground, fans and trolls alike.
For this film obsessive, I opt to just keep my ideas to myself and my newsletter these days. I don’t feel the need to go to comment sections, where people get into pointless arguments with people they’ll never meet (or LLMs spewing garbage). It just seems like a waste of time to me now in ways that curated communities like newsletter groups and Discord servers are not.
In June 2023, Alex Pareene wrote an essay for Defector titled The Last Page of the Internet in which he said:
We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it.
Just so, useful film criticism is similarly walled off and I can't help but feel IMDB's message boards rotting before my eyes heralded the broader decay of the internet we all used to call home.
Rachel Meghan (they/she) is a mother and writer based in Providence, RI. They write for Rue Morgue and Books by Page, and are an associate editor with The Hot Mess Press. In addition, they’ve been seen in Business Insider, Poynter, Open Secrets, MetroUK, and others. Find them on Monstrorachel.substack.com