Bring back the message boards

This is so true. On one of 'my' boards, we had a troll show up who made life MISERABLE for the rest of us. And he had sock puppets, too! So there were multiple accounts being used to destroy this formerly friendly, inviting board.

Complaints to IMDb went unheard/not acted on. It got so bad at one point that I opened up a temporary forum on one of my domains, and only my invited friends from the IMDb board could join. We used that for a few months, until the troll and sock puppets finally left...and then, not long afterward, IMDb shut them all down!

Still, it is hard to ensure a mostly-positive experience for the vast majority of the participants. For some reason, most human beings have some kind of natural inclination to acquiesce to "echo chambers" and confirmation bias, and social media sites are very good at seamlessly re-enforcing the phenomena using the same algorithms that figure out which advertisements to display to which visitors. There are pros and cons for either way. Some of the message boards of IMDb·Com basically ensured that people who might be very much incapable of agreeing on many things they held dear would always cross each others' paths, unless they made use of the "ignore" feature. A nice feature to be sure, but people who rely heavily upon it put themselves in the position of not being able to defend themselves against libel.

The complaint system definitely has to be functional and accountable, but we may always wonder how effective it can be when a vast majority of participants of a forum have a new complaint every day or every hour about a fellow participant, whether it is same one as before or a new one, whether the complaint is crucial or frivolous. Then there is the matter of complaints against the arbiters of the system who've grown weary or corrupt, losing impartiality, or who've done everything right but still receive persistent condemnations. So, that's where the automation and farce come into play, in order to install a very flattering dopamine-driven experience tailored to the needs of each user. LOL!