> On Letterboxd, the reviews can be as entertaining as the movies themselves.
Hard disagree here. There are some good reviewers on there but you have to wade through a mountain of terrible one-liners from wannabe comedians. No matter how many of these users I block there are always more of them popping up. I wish they had a character or sentence length filter for reviews that could be toggled on, for those of us who aren't looking for a "Twitter for movies" experience.
My strategy has been to follow accounts that just repost reviews by well respected film critics, usually older ones like Stanley Kauffman or Pauline Kael. Typically they're well written even if I disagree with the take, and they avoid the overwriting problem that even the more thoughtful Letterboxd users are prone to (easier to write a long, rambling review than a concise one). But those accounts get taken down occasionally, usually don't have any reviews for more recent movies, and have spotty coverage even for older movies.
There's not much Letterboxd does that cannot be federated. For one, their metadata database is a near full replica of TMDB, with very minor exceptions such as retaining deleted TMDB media. I'm not opposed to Letterboxd dying if it means people consider an alternative that is less fragile.
The value of many platforms is not the database or the stack, but the community on it. People use Letterboxd because their friends are there and because actors and directors have their lists and ratings there.
Is the statement in the linked article that "The Internet Movie Database functions as a loss leader for the e-commerce giant" backed up somewhere?
IMDB offers both Pro Subscriptions. IMDB offers data licenses that the company claims are licensed "to a wide selection of businesses including movie studios, cable companies, websites, video retailers, software developers, electronics manufacturers, mobile applications, and more."[1]
IMDB offers advertising and has 250M visitors per month.[2]
None of these point to the likelihood that IMDB is a loss leader.
It was initially purchased as a vehicle to drive customers to Amazon's DVD sales business. I think it's monetized itself pretty well since then, though.
The TL;DR is that the VC/PE firm that owns 60% of Letterboxd is selling their stake in the company and some people are panicking because they don't want it purchased by a VC/PE firm.
There's a crowdfunding campaign trying to raise $100,000 to make an offer to buy the site for some public governance structure, with no explanation of how they're going to get the money to buy Letterboxd.
This could be interesting if the group asking for $100,000 had any plausible plan at all to fund their purchase, but if there is such a plan I can't find it.
why don't we kill off Goodreads instead! Bad UI, confusing, poor features, toxic users. Letterboxd is harmless, anyone could vibecode a replacement in a day and a half.
Monetisation isn't currently a concern as we are growing insanely quickly but for a lot of these types of services, it's not as hard as it looks. MyAnimeList and fanfiction.net have all been around for decades, sustained purely by ads and low-hanging-fruit monetisation efforts. Enshittification is a risk but the market is a lot more liquid than most people think.
When people got fed up with Fanfiction.net and Wattpad /Tumblr, AO3 was born. The schism of SpaceBattle led to the formation of Sufficient Velocity and Questionable Questing. There are newer generation of VC funded apps like Lore Obsessed that's trying to do some sort of AI mashup of the fandom.com wikis.
The fact that the customers are so fickle and not particularly sticky compared to the users of other UGC powered social networks is frankly a pretty big problem (especially if you have don't have Amazon as a patron like Goodreads and IMDB). The type of artsy audience that makes up a large portion of the user base are a lot more sensitive to issues like public relations, reputation management, communication etc. There's this famous perfume aggregator+UGC reviews platform called Fragrantica that's allegedly haemorrhaging users because people claimed the owner was a Trump supporter. You don't really get the Twitter/Meta/Tiktok level of stickiness where corporate misbehavior at the executive level have muted impact on the actual day to day user metrics. This might seem like a feature until if you think about it, half the reason people use UGC platforms is because of other users do. It's tricky to get celebs and whale users if your audience tends to leave at the slightest hint of controversy. Controversy is often the lifeblood of this sort of communities; too little and you have a rather anaemic community (like a dead IRC or Discord server). Too much, and you get an exodus of users. So you end up having to take an active approach in day to day moderation. It's also why smart companies like Twitch keep around the "bad actors" and if you see Reddit r/ livestreamfail, the big streamers are often in trouble for petty crime, sexual misconduct, bad behaviour etc. It's precisely because of the engagement stirred up. If you ban every violator of the code of conduct permanently, you will just end up making competitor platforms like Kick the next dominant platform. It takes a very deft hand to run this sort of services.
There are also a lot of institutional risks around this sort of services. The recent LLM scraping boom and copyright office changes and AI data laundering rulings have made some things easier but the proliferation of KYC for anything vaguely adult has made others harder. I won't be surprised if non profit platforms like AO3 either move out of the states eventually or be forced to implement some of age verification (most likely client side device level attestation like what Meta/Zuckerberg has been pushing).
The stack isn't anything too interesting right now, it's a pretty standard web stack. The architecture is a lot more distributed than I would prefer mostly because of the data ingestion pipeline. There's a lot more manual work that goes into this than it looks on the surface because many of the web fiction/fan fiction sites don't have proper APIs/RSS feeds. The big ones do but a significant percentage are just random WordPress sites where stuff can break at a moment's notice.
I will probably set up a Discord group for it if there's more interest, I have been getting a lot of requests for one from the user base (they don't particularly like email support, I suggested IRC or Zulip but I don't think most of them cares enough).
> On Letterboxd, the reviews can be as entertaining as the movies themselves.
Hard disagree here. There are some good reviewers on there but you have to wade through a mountain of terrible one-liners from wannabe comedians. No matter how many of these users I block there are always more of them popping up. I wish they had a character or sentence length filter for reviews that could be toggled on, for those of us who aren't looking for a "Twitter for movies" experience.
The only solution is following/friending people who write thoughtful reviews as well as going through their friends if the number is low.
Also if you go to esoteric enough films you mostly filter out the joke reviews
My strategy has been to follow accounts that just repost reviews by well respected film critics, usually older ones like Stanley Kauffman or Pauline Kael. Typically they're well written even if I disagree with the take, and they avoid the overwriting problem that even the more thoughtful Letterboxd users are prone to (easier to write a long, rambling review than a concise one). But those accounts get taken down occasionally, usually don't have any reviews for more recent movies, and have spotty coverage even for older movies.
There's not much Letterboxd does that cannot be federated. For one, their metadata database is a near full replica of TMDB, with very minor exceptions such as retaining deleted TMDB media. I'm not opposed to Letterboxd dying if it means people consider an alternative that is less fragile.
The value of many platforms is not the database or the stack, but the community on it. People use Letterboxd because their friends are there and because actors and directors have their lists and ratings there.
Is the statement in the linked article that "The Internet Movie Database functions as a loss leader for the e-commerce giant" backed up somewhere?
IMDB offers both Pro Subscriptions. IMDB offers data licenses that the company claims are licensed "to a wide selection of businesses including movie studios, cable companies, websites, video retailers, software developers, electronics manufacturers, mobile applications, and more."[1]
IMDB offers advertising and has 250M visitors per month.[2]
None of these point to the likelihood that IMDB is a loss leader.
1 = https://help.imdb.com/article/imdb/general-information/conte... 2 = https://advertising.amazon.com/channels/imdb
It was initially purchased as a vehicle to drive customers to Amazon's DVD sales business. I think it's monetized itself pretty well since then, though.
It now drives the "actors in this scene" feature in Amazon Prime.
The TL;DR is that the VC/PE firm that owns 60% of Letterboxd is selling their stake in the company and some people are panicking because they don't want it purchased by a VC/PE firm.
There's a crowdfunding campaign trying to raise $100,000 to make an offer to buy the site for some public governance structure, with no explanation of how they're going to get the money to buy Letterboxd.
This could be interesting if the group asking for $100,000 had any plausible plan at all to fund their purchase, but if there is such a plan I can't find it.
why don't we kill off Goodreads instead! Bad UI, confusing, poor features, toxic users. Letterboxd is harmless, anyone could vibecode a replacement in a day and a half.
This seems to completely miss one of the main selling points of Letterboxd - unlike IMDB its UI isn't dogshit.
I get what you mean and it's certainly true, but he UI of either product can be simplified or bloated in a quarter by infra/development.
The real value of letterbox'd is it's community and "pop culture" relevance. I think that will drive the purchase more than anything
This is a very interesting article because I run a similar service in an adjacent space for tracking and reviewing fanfiction and web fictions.
https://storywatch.org
Monetisation isn't currently a concern as we are growing insanely quickly but for a lot of these types of services, it's not as hard as it looks. MyAnimeList and fanfiction.net have all been around for decades, sustained purely by ads and low-hanging-fruit monetisation efforts. Enshittification is a risk but the market is a lot more liquid than most people think.
When people got fed up with Fanfiction.net and Wattpad /Tumblr, AO3 was born. The schism of SpaceBattle led to the formation of Sufficient Velocity and Questionable Questing. There are newer generation of VC funded apps like Lore Obsessed that's trying to do some sort of AI mashup of the fandom.com wikis.
The fact that the customers are so fickle and not particularly sticky compared to the users of other UGC powered social networks is frankly a pretty big problem (especially if you have don't have Amazon as a patron like Goodreads and IMDB). The type of artsy audience that makes up a large portion of the user base are a lot more sensitive to issues like public relations, reputation management, communication etc. There's this famous perfume aggregator+UGC reviews platform called Fragrantica that's allegedly haemorrhaging users because people claimed the owner was a Trump supporter. You don't really get the Twitter/Meta/Tiktok level of stickiness where corporate misbehavior at the executive level have muted impact on the actual day to day user metrics. This might seem like a feature until if you think about it, half the reason people use UGC platforms is because of other users do. It's tricky to get celebs and whale users if your audience tends to leave at the slightest hint of controversy. Controversy is often the lifeblood of this sort of communities; too little and you have a rather anaemic community (like a dead IRC or Discord server). Too much, and you get an exodus of users. So you end up having to take an active approach in day to day moderation. It's also why smart companies like Twitch keep around the "bad actors" and if you see Reddit r/ livestreamfail, the big streamers are often in trouble for petty crime, sexual misconduct, bad behaviour etc. It's precisely because of the engagement stirred up. If you ban every violator of the code of conduct permanently, you will just end up making competitor platforms like Kick the next dominant platform. It takes a very deft hand to run this sort of services.
There are also a lot of institutional risks around this sort of services. The recent LLM scraping boom and copyright office changes and AI data laundering rulings have made some things easier but the proliferation of KYC for anything vaguely adult has made others harder. I won't be surprised if non profit platforms like AO3 either move out of the states eventually or be forced to implement some of age verification (most likely client side device level attestation like what Meta/Zuckerberg has been pushing).
interesting project! Where's the code hosted?
The stack isn't anything too interesting right now, it's a pretty standard web stack. The architecture is a lot more distributed than I would prefer mostly because of the data ingestion pipeline. There's a lot more manual work that goes into this than it looks on the surface because many of the web fiction/fan fiction sites don't have proper APIs/RSS feeds. The big ones do but a significant percentage are just random WordPress sites where stuff can break at a moment's notice.
I will probably set up a Discord group for it if there's more interest, I have been getting a lot of requests for one from the user base (they don't particularly like email support, I suggested IRC or Zulip but I don't think most of them cares enough).