Lists: How about organizing the lists better?

@anotherwhitemeat​ ,

IMDb polls are based on IMDb list. Although it would be helpful to better curate lists, making lists private until they are vetted would make reviewing poll suggestions a significant challenge. Likewise, vetting list would take a significant amount of effort that would likely fall upon IMDb staff.

A better option would be an option to be able to search lists within IMDb.

In the mean time, each name page and title pages has lists of lists and polls associated with the person and title respectively. You can also use Google search to find a specific list:

site:www.imdb.com/list/ [keyword]

or poll:

site:www.imdb.com/poll/ [keyword]

Example, search for lists and polls with the keyword Michael:

site:www.imdb.com/list/ michael 

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.imdb.com%2Flist%2F+michael

site:www.imdb.com/poll/ michael

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.imdb.com%2Fpoll%2F+michael

@dan_dassow 

Appreciate the feedback and I can see how automatically making lists Private would create problems.

The solutions that you're offering to get past the uselessness of the List lists are not worth taking in my opinion. If I'm on Google already, I'm not searching IMDB for their lists. There are 100's of different options at that point. 

I'm sure they don't want an entire taskforce taking care of this either but if you had one person going through periodically and just switching out some of these lists to Private it would benefit the entire site. 

Imagine a "All the Movies I've Seen" list by some random user that has over 4,000 movies in it. Making that individual list Private would remove it from 4,000 movie pages that have to list that List as one that contains that movie. You've solved 4,000 problems with one switch. If someone spent 8 hours doing that for one day you'd be able to clean up a significant portion of the site.

It feels like an easy task with absolutely no detriment to it. The list still exists for the user that made it. And I would only do this to the meaningless lists that serve no purpose. If there's even a question of value, I'm fine with leaving it. But a list of Every Horror Movie is literally available to search through the Advanced Search. Click Feature Films. Click Horror. Done. We don't need 100 of those lists that serve no purpose other than standing in the way of finding a list that actually has value, whether it's solid information ("Every Movie with a Vampire") or opinion based ("Friday the 13th, Ranked").

If you made every "Movies I Own" list Private, that alone would be a significant dent in the refuse that is scrolling through Lists currently.

@anotherwhitemeat​ ,

I agree that many user created IMDb lists are not worth the electrons sacrificed to create them. "Movies that I've Seen" is a prime candidate.

I suspect many people do not really want or need their lists to be public, but don't think that their lists are only of interest to themselves or to a limited group of people.

Maybe an option to share your list to select user IDs would be helpful.

“I suspect many people do not really want or need their lists to be public,” - agreed. That’s why I thought the standard setting of Private vs. Public might help.

There are two enemies here, one is plain ignorant and the other is disillusioned into thinking we actually are interested in their list of “TV Shows watched in 2017.”

It would be nice if people labelled their lists, I can’t tell you how many “Horror” lists there are. Ok, horror you like? Horror you’d recommend? What do these 35 unmarked and randomly listed horror movies mean to you and what should they mean to me? 

That’s why I think some oversight is needed. There will always be these two types of people, they just need to be roped in a bit so they don’t ruin the site.