First you needed to create an account to view reviews on the IMDB website.
As of today, the same has now been implemented for the mobile app. So far it was excluded from the enshittification but fuck IMDB and fuck Amazon who own IMDB.
What is another good movie / series review app that does not need an anal probe to look at reviews?
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Love TMDB.
The only downer is when someone posts a very right-wing coded review, there’s no blocking or reporting functionality, so it stands. I don’t care how ‘woke’ a person thinks something is. I want to hear a legit, constructive critique.
You weren’t kidding. First review I bothered to read and it’s clearly the ramblings of a mentally ill fascist. If this is common they should remove reviews entirely, as crazies waging culture war will hinder adoption.
“Masterpiece of reality” lol
I’m an enjoyer of Trakt.tv.
They don’t seem to have an app. I prefer a good app over a website.
The site is a web app. You can install it from your browser. It’s way better than IMDB and I’m not sure why it is so difficult to discover through search. Everyone should be using it.
Also the IMDb app is almost certainly just a web view wrapper, as are the vast majority of apps today
I love it when my app takes 8 seconds to load 120MB of JavaScript frameworks and CSS and images. It really gets me going, the anticipation
I almost always prefer the website to an app. Browsers loading a website have limited permissions on a phone vs an app.
That’s why every fucking website has that annoying banner begging you to install their
spywareapp
Comes in rightfully complaining about enshitification & then hits us with a wild curveball about preferring an app (which all but ensures you will need to login, yes connecting with your google / apple account is logging in).
I don’t know what apps you are using but besides my payment apps and Google play store, I have no other apps that require login if I just want to check out some reviews or basic information. TripAdvisor doesn’t need a login, booking.com doesn’t need a login to just to read reviews. Hell even Amazon itself doesn’t require a login if I want to read some book reviews.
And I prefer an app because I can control the permissions instead of a website littered with cookies and trackers.
Why?
I tend to use TMDB more, but when I really want to know whether others consider it good or bad i check rotten tomatoes, they have do an app: https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/app/
Either way, fuck IMDB.
i do too, but its still a bit conflicted since its owned by another studio
Since January 2010, Rotten Tomatoes has been owned by Flixster, which was in turn acquired by Warner Bros. in 2011. In February 2016, Rotten Tomatoes and its parent site Flixster were sold to Versant’s (then NBCUniversal’s) Fandango ticketing company.[10] Warner Bros. retained a minority stake in the merged entities, including Fandango.[
Use Hermit to create an app experience for a website
On a semi-related note, goodreads is also owned by Amazon. I’ve been using hardcover.app instead.
Thanks for the recommendation. Just migrated to Hardcover.
A while back Amazon started requiring logins to view or search product reviews. (They show a very limited number without login.)
Anyone who’s ever looked through Amazon reviews knows a huge number of them (and sometime the majority) are bullshit, but apparently that’s just fine with Amazon. They were able to completely shut down sites like fakespot.com with that one move so buyers are now on their own.
I knew they were limiting features for the purpose of increasing click through and time-engaged when they removed the role from an actor/actress’ Filmography.
So if you’re watching a movie/show and you see a familiar face but can’t place it, now instead of seeing the role at under the piece of media, you have to click See all and then scroll to find it.
Growing up with the internet, we were using IMDB as a way to win arguments or learn about shows. Back then, Wikipedia (or all those fandom wikis) didn’t exist. So IMDB was the top place.
You saw a ridiculously gorgeous actor and wanted to creep on all their movies? IMDB.
You wanted to know what Simpsons episode had Poochie the dog? IMDB.
You wanted to know what people thought about the new characters in Lost Season 2? Yes, IMDB has forums.
It started going to shit before Amazon bought it. It became an absolute pile of shit where doing any of those three things listed above was near impossible without ads or clicking a dozen places.
They overestimate their importance?
I noticed this one too, come over at letterboxd.com.
The worst thing about it is that the actual insightful reviews are often hidden in the user reviews, while the rating and “featured” reviews often look quite biased or even manipulated in favor of the movie. Fuck imdb
Actually… I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt there.
With the entire internet flooded with abusive scrapers, putting text reviews behind a free login kinda makes sense. It’d dent bots and review manipulation programs, too, which are a huge issue on IMDB already.
Not that IMDB isn’t enshittified. You should use other databases, but still.
I’ve noticed this sort if thing becoming more common and I think it is very much related to bots scraping the web. I’m sure they’ll be happy to sell access to that data though.
Ooh, open source! But they don’t seem to have movie reviews?
It is supposed to cover anything in the world worth reviewing: books, movies, games, places; but not many people are using it yet.
I see. So the types of review listed is an ‘as of yet’ type of situation then.
Yeah, I basically stopped using IMDb because it’s now useless. I’m not logging in.
My taste is 3-5 star movies.
The problem with IMDb is 80% of people rate movies on production quality. I like crappy movies, so production values are low and they lose a solid 4 stars. They’re not even b movies. But then there are “good” movies that utterly suck with awful plots and they get the same rating.
So I have to look at 3 stars, use the user rating to see if anyone finds the movie good despite its flaws, then I click their profile and see if they have lists. Those are gold. (Once I found a list called “movies I worked on” and it was some person movie from junk to big budget films over the years. )
Now that doesn’t work, so there’s no value.
Honestly you might find it more accurate to go by gut feeling/trailer or word of mouth. Imdb ratings are good for weeding out the truly bad ones, but for the rest it’s fairly unreliable. You can also see rotten tomatoes, but these days it feels very astroturfed and I haven’t really matched my rating with theirs for all but a couple movies that I saw. Letterboxd is better for user reviews but it’s very hivemind-y because popular opinion prevails kn their ratings.
Which region?
I haven’t seen this apart from an account pop up that can be dismissed so far in UK.
EU/DE certainly has been like this for a few days now.
I’m sure it won’t take long to infect everything.
Letterboxd is pretty good, though it got bought by private equity a few years ago and they’re now trying to flog it off to Netflix or Paramount, so probably numbered days
Letterboxd has been great for movie buffs but it has gained a mainstream crowd over the years and become less trustworthy with big titles and movies with celebrities that people have the hornies for.
Still too bad to hear about these ambitions of making the big buck out of it.
I don’t bother with ratings or reviews. If I think something might be good or interesting, I’ll watch it.
