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Hi there, fellow MoFos!
As some of you may know, I'm currently studying for my second Master's Degree. After having completed my studies in Economics, I'm now studying Journalism. One of my assignments was to interview someone who's working in the cultural sector and write an article about that person (in Dutch). I thought this was an excellent occasion to interview our very own site administrator, @Yoda himself!
I focused on his vision for this site and his ideas about internet culture in general. In an age where the giant social media corporations are absorbing all digital communication, it's sometimes necessary to stand still and appreciate an authentic small digital community like our beloved Movieforums, where we can have hours long discussions with people from all over the world who share our deepest passions.
The original article is in Dutch, but I'll post the raw English version of the whole interview right here. I hope you Mofos enjoy reading it. I think our 33 year old leader from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania had quite a lot of interesting things to say!
----------------------------------------------------
When and why did you create Movieforums?
I created Movie Forums in July of 2000. I was 15 and part of a web development forum, which fed into the decision in two ways: I was learning about web development and I was learning about it through discussion with others. I wanted a project to learn more about how forums worked on the technical side, and I wanted to learn more about what makes them work on the cultural side, too.
And, if I'm being honest, as a teenager I was probably attracted to the idea of being in charge of something.
Was the overall theme of the forums ('movies') something that was more or less coincidental then?
A little bit. I chose a topic I knew I'd have plenty to say about myself, since any new standalone forum is going to need its creator to participate a lot early on, but I decided to start a forum of some kind first and then chose the topic. The topic mattered, but not as much as starting some kind of forum.
Have you learnt something about 'people who love movies' specifically? Do you think that cinephiles have characteristics that are different from other kind of people? Do you think 'movie communities' are somehow different compared to other communities (in a social sense)?
I think movie communities are a little more prone to arguments about class and status, because they're simultaneously a serious art form and a serious mode of mass entertainment, so on even a moderately-sized forum you'll have people who love blockbusters alongside people who prefer art house cinema.
I do think movie communities are a little different now, as well, in that they're less an extension of offline communities than some others. Most other hobbies have a significant offline component that a forum like this would only supplement. But movies are much less of a communal experience than they used to be. A lot of film watching is done at home or alone, so I think of movie discussion as an increasingly necessary outlet that isn't really built in to the hobby itself, the way it is with so many others.
Are you still glad you chose "movies"? If you could choose a new theme today, which theme would it be?
It might be baseball, simply because I love it so much (I briefly ran a baseball site as a teenager, which also had a short-lived forum attached to it at one point) and I think moderating that kind of thing would be a fairly low-key affair.
The role of this site in my life is so significant that I can't even wrap my head around the idea of having chosen something else. I've been running it more than half my life now. To entertain the idea of running a different site is to entertain the idea of being a completely different person.
What do you do for a living?
I'm a television producer and web developer. More the latter, as time goes on.
How much time does the site still take out of your day/week?
At this point, huge portions of the site mostly run themselves, or can be run with minimal effort by myself and the moderators. A lot of our anti-spam measures block spam upfront, and allows users to remove the rest on their own, so if I have something else distracting me for a few days, it's usually not a big problem.
The only time it ends up requiring a lot of effort is if something breaks (mercifully rare), I roll out some new features, or if there's some big dispute or moderation issue. When any of those happens, it can end up taking a few hours a day or more.
How much financial profit does this 20 year old site still generate? Did it use to be more or less?
Even at its height it was never a living, but it used to make more. It makes very little now, but that's partially intentional: forums have gotten harder to monetize, and rather than try to squeeze what I can from it, I've gone the other way. We've had little to no advertising the last several years, just focusing on growing the site itself.
That may change, but the ethos has been to keep the focus on the discussion, lots of advertising doesn't quite fit with that. If I have to run the site as a labor of love without making much, and use it just to try new ideas and learn more about how people interact, that's okay with me.
Have there ever been (serious) offers from people to take over Movieforums? Did they reveal their plans? Would you ever consider selling the site?
Yes to all three. There have been many inquiries, a few of which were serious. Most didn't get far enough along for a detailed discussion about their plans, but a couple implied that they'd want to keep it running at least mostly as-is.
The site takes up enough time that I'd have to consider selling it if the offer were generous enough, but I think that's unlikely barring some major shift in life circumstances. Most people buying sites are looking for passive income, and I value this place well beyond its established income potential. For someone to pay a high enough price for me to part with it, they'd probably need to enjoy running it for its own sake, and/or see the potential in it that I still do.
What do you think is the most precious thing members get out of being active on Movieforums? Can this be found in other places as well or does Movieforums offer a (relatively) unique experience?
Most forums, if they're any good, have a distinct culture that you can't really find in other places. In that sense, every forum has something you can't get elsewhere, just like every group of friends is different; but in both cases, the "something" is usually idiosyncratic and only important to the people who were there to help create it. It doesn't scale.
What sets this site apart is that, while we certainly have our history and our in-jokes, the defining attributes are things people can appreciate the moment they see them. If someone visits for the first time and looks around for a few minutes, they can see that there's no spam, that it's not overrun by trolls, that threads are reasonably well-organized, and that they contain lots of real discussion. There's also not a lot of unnecessary bells and whistles. They can see that 90% of what's here is just talking about movies without all the extra stuff that can get in the way of that, either culturally or aesthetically.
Are there any notable "inside jokes" or idiosyncratic aspects that you particularly love about the MoFo community?
Too many to list! I love changing the name of The Shoutbox when the conversation veers off into something crazy, I still love the little bit of code that shows the username of whoever's reading it, so people think they're being wished a Happy Birthday, or being told "I love you" when it's really directed at everyone. I particularly love that so many of the things that upset people at the time--troublesome members, mostly--have become sources of community bonding when we look back at them.
Some of the funniest days of my entire life have been spent here, reacting to some crazy thing someone said which the community picked up and ran with. That sort of thing isn't just my favorite part of this place, but it's my favorite part of the Internet in general. That's the kind of thing the Internet is good at. There's a lot of ugly stuff online, but when groups of people online are witnessing something together, and reacting and making good-natured jokes and being clever, and volleying the best responses around to each other, that's the medium at its best.
Is there currently a specific innovation or evolution when it comes to internet culture that you find particularly interesting/fascinating?
It's as upsetting as it is fascinating, but the rise of trolling is probably the most interesting thing. The lengths people will go to to procure attention or feel important or powerful is a disturbing window into human nature.
What are the advantages of exchanging information and having conversations within a more restricted (digital) community, like Movieforums, compared to doing those same things on larger (social media) platforms?
Forums encourage more substantive discussion, in ways large and small. The large way is that its asynchronous: you're not expected to reply right away. You might not even be online when a response comes in. This helps make responses more measured and thoughtful, in the way any response is if you're forced to breathe and count to 10 before giving it.
It does this in small ways, too: forum pages don't instantly refresh, there are tools that make it easy to quote someone directly, and find the source of that quote, and even the size of the text box hints that responses should be longer and more detailed (ours even stretches to accommodate longer messages).
Compare that to Facebook. Comments come in right away, there's a sound notification to make sure you see it immediately, text boxes are tiny, there's no good quote facility, and so on. Websites unconsciously tell their users how to use them in a thousand tiny ways, and everything about social media tells them "read this immediately and reply without thinking too much."
Why do you think there's still consistent activity on Movieforums, despite all the other, much larger (social media) platforms that have "taken the place" of many other forums. What is Movieforums doing right?
People who see movies want to talk about them. That will always be true. What Movie Forums does right is it recognizes this as the central reason it has to exist, and tries to facilitate it instead of throwing up roadblocks.
It's sounds simple and obvious, but most of what we do right is just avoiding so many of the things other sites do wrong.
Were there ever times when the site was struggling to stay relevant or even alive?
Probably not struggling to stay alive, because while it's occasionally taken up a lot of time, the costs of merely keeping it up and running have been pretty low. There have definitely been, over the years, a massive rush of movie websites popping up. We've outlasted almost all of them, but there's a steady flow of new blogs and news sites with stapled-on comment sections, and though most of them don't stick around or take away much, they can combine to make a real difference.
We tried to keep up with some of this for awhile, in the early days. We had a news section, for example. Eventually it became obvious this was going to be impossible, and that it made sense to emphasize the things you could only get here: the discussion. Now, virtually everything is tied into the forums in some way, because that's the thing fly-by-night news sites and blogs can't duplicate.
What about huge discussion platforms like Reddit? Have they been or are they a legitimate threat to smaller forum communities?
Certainly to some types of them. They're still very scaled down and simple; they're not as openly hostile to long form discussions as social media is, but they're still more for shorter exchanges of information, and there's a much weaker sense of identity on them. Forums have distinct personalities tied to avatars and post history; in reddit, you barely even notice the names. This has advantages, to be sure, but it also precludes a certain level of familiarity. Much harder to imagine people making friends there.
Would it be possible to create Movieforums and make it a success in today's internet climate?
I think so, because I think we're seeing some push back on social media, and a renewed desire for substantive, longer discussions. There's no doubt social media has cut back on forum activity overall, but it's mostly done this by outsourcing the messier and uglier parts of forum culture to other platforms entirely. What's left may be fewer people, but it's also people who are far better suited to a forum.
I don't think social media is going away, but I think in some senses it's already peaked. The only part of this question that gives me pause is how broad the topic of "movies" is now, given the size of the industry. I am very, very bullish on the future of niche forums. I'm a little more circumspect about the future of forums on larger topics. And "movies" straddle the line between those two. They're often niche (particularly when you're talking about real cinephiles), but they're so popular and culturally influential that everyone has an opinion on them, anyway.
Of course, leading a social platform like this also asks for moral judgement. You have to decide for yourself when someone (or something) is crossing a line. What's important to keep in mind when bearing such a responsibility?
Precedent. Your concern can never just be with resolving the current situation, but resolving it in a way that doesn't make future situations harder to resolve.
There's an old saying that "hard cases make bad law." No matter where you draw the line, there will be situations that make the rule look silly, but it'll look even sillier if you constantly try to modify it to draw around unusual situations.
You always say Movieforums is a PG-13 forum (referring to the Movie rating system). Do you think it's important for a digital social environment to not go beyond that in order to stay healthy?
I think the word "healthy" changes a lot depending on a forum's goals. If a forum values open expression above all else, then "healthy" might necessarily mean a lot of vulgarity or trolling. If it values substantive debate, the definition changes.
I think online communities with far more (or far fewer) restrictions than ours can be very valuable, and I often tell people who question the rules here that I completely understand and respect their choice to find another place, if they find it too restrictive.
The part I feel strongly about is that these rules have a major downstream effect on the quality of discussion. Technically, a few swear words here and there are not mutually exclusive with serious discussion, but I think they make it a good deal harder, and infect the discourse in ways that aren't going to be perfectly traceable or quantifiable.
The larger social platforms still get a lot of criticism about how they handle this 'moral judgement' task. Do you think they can learn something from smaller social platforms like Movieforums, despite the difference in scale?
I think that difference in scale is exactly what they can learn. The larger the group, the less tenable universal rules are going to be. At a certain point you're not managing or facilitating relationships, you're just herding. "Large community" is an oxymoron.
Do you still have some specific upcoming plans for Movieforums? Or did you ever use to have certain wild ambitions for this site that were never realized?
I have quite a few features in mind, yes. Some only became possible recently, and should go live this year. Mostly straightforward things like movie logs and fun things with aggregate data on ratings, lists, and favorites. But there are other ideas I've thought about off and on for years that might still happen. I have many long text files of ideas, both large and small.
My wildest ambitions have always been exponential growth, though over time I've wondered if that would really be good for the site, partially because of what I said earlier about large communities and problems of scale. But I do think it can be much bigger than it is now without losing its essence.
Let's end this interview on a personal note. Why did you never quit? What kept you going all these years?
There have been times I've wondered if it's worthwhile, since there's no way it's paid for itself if you factor in the amount of time spent. But I've learned so much running it, both technically and about people in general. That alone keeps it going. That, and a general curiosity about what happens to a site like this after so long. We're coming up on 20 years. That's almost unheard of. We're in mostly uncharted territory here. That, all by itself, feels like reason to keep going.
----------------------------------------------------
As some of you may know, I'm currently studying for my second Master's Degree. After having completed my studies in Economics, I'm now studying Journalism. One of my assignments was to interview someone who's working in the cultural sector and write an article about that person (in Dutch). I thought this was an excellent occasion to interview our very own site administrator, @Yoda himself!
I focused on his vision for this site and his ideas about internet culture in general. In an age where the giant social media corporations are absorbing all digital communication, it's sometimes necessary to stand still and appreciate an authentic small digital community like our beloved Movieforums, where we can have hours long discussions with people from all over the world who share our deepest passions.
The original article is in Dutch, but I'll post the raw English version of the whole interview right here. I hope you Mofos enjoy reading it. I think our 33 year old leader from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania had quite a lot of interesting things to say!
----------------------------------------------------
When and why did you create Movieforums?
I created Movie Forums in July of 2000. I was 15 and part of a web development forum, which fed into the decision in two ways: I was learning about web development and I was learning about it through discussion with others. I wanted a project to learn more about how forums worked on the technical side, and I wanted to learn more about what makes them work on the cultural side, too.
And, if I'm being honest, as a teenager I was probably attracted to the idea of being in charge of something.
Was the overall theme of the forums ('movies') something that was more or less coincidental then?
A little bit. I chose a topic I knew I'd have plenty to say about myself, since any new standalone forum is going to need its creator to participate a lot early on, but I decided to start a forum of some kind first and then chose the topic. The topic mattered, but not as much as starting some kind of forum.
Have you learnt something about 'people who love movies' specifically? Do you think that cinephiles have characteristics that are different from other kind of people? Do you think 'movie communities' are somehow different compared to other communities (in a social sense)?
I think movie communities are a little more prone to arguments about class and status, because they're simultaneously a serious art form and a serious mode of mass entertainment, so on even a moderately-sized forum you'll have people who love blockbusters alongside people who prefer art house cinema.
I do think movie communities are a little different now, as well, in that they're less an extension of offline communities than some others. Most other hobbies have a significant offline component that a forum like this would only supplement. But movies are much less of a communal experience than they used to be. A lot of film watching is done at home or alone, so I think of movie discussion as an increasingly necessary outlet that isn't really built in to the hobby itself, the way it is with so many others.
Are you still glad you chose "movies"? If you could choose a new theme today, which theme would it be?
It might be baseball, simply because I love it so much (I briefly ran a baseball site as a teenager, which also had a short-lived forum attached to it at one point) and I think moderating that kind of thing would be a fairly low-key affair.
The role of this site in my life is so significant that I can't even wrap my head around the idea of having chosen something else. I've been running it more than half my life now. To entertain the idea of running a different site is to entertain the idea of being a completely different person.
What do you do for a living?
I'm a television producer and web developer. More the latter, as time goes on.
How much time does the site still take out of your day/week?
At this point, huge portions of the site mostly run themselves, or can be run with minimal effort by myself and the moderators. A lot of our anti-spam measures block spam upfront, and allows users to remove the rest on their own, so if I have something else distracting me for a few days, it's usually not a big problem.
The only time it ends up requiring a lot of effort is if something breaks (mercifully rare), I roll out some new features, or if there's some big dispute or moderation issue. When any of those happens, it can end up taking a few hours a day or more.
How much financial profit does this 20 year old site still generate? Did it use to be more or less?
Even at its height it was never a living, but it used to make more. It makes very little now, but that's partially intentional: forums have gotten harder to monetize, and rather than try to squeeze what I can from it, I've gone the other way. We've had little to no advertising the last several years, just focusing on growing the site itself.
That may change, but the ethos has been to keep the focus on the discussion, lots of advertising doesn't quite fit with that. If I have to run the site as a labor of love without making much, and use it just to try new ideas and learn more about how people interact, that's okay with me.
Have there ever been (serious) offers from people to take over Movieforums? Did they reveal their plans? Would you ever consider selling the site?
Yes to all three. There have been many inquiries, a few of which were serious. Most didn't get far enough along for a detailed discussion about their plans, but a couple implied that they'd want to keep it running at least mostly as-is.
The site takes up enough time that I'd have to consider selling it if the offer were generous enough, but I think that's unlikely barring some major shift in life circumstances. Most people buying sites are looking for passive income, and I value this place well beyond its established income potential. For someone to pay a high enough price for me to part with it, they'd probably need to enjoy running it for its own sake, and/or see the potential in it that I still do.
What do you think is the most precious thing members get out of being active on Movieforums? Can this be found in other places as well or does Movieforums offer a (relatively) unique experience?
Most forums, if they're any good, have a distinct culture that you can't really find in other places. In that sense, every forum has something you can't get elsewhere, just like every group of friends is different; but in both cases, the "something" is usually idiosyncratic and only important to the people who were there to help create it. It doesn't scale.
What sets this site apart is that, while we certainly have our history and our in-jokes, the defining attributes are things people can appreciate the moment they see them. If someone visits for the first time and looks around for a few minutes, they can see that there's no spam, that it's not overrun by trolls, that threads are reasonably well-organized, and that they contain lots of real discussion. There's also not a lot of unnecessary bells and whistles. They can see that 90% of what's here is just talking about movies without all the extra stuff that can get in the way of that, either culturally or aesthetically.
Are there any notable "inside jokes" or idiosyncratic aspects that you particularly love about the MoFo community?
Too many to list! I love changing the name of The Shoutbox when the conversation veers off into something crazy, I still love the little bit of code that shows the username of whoever's reading it, so people think they're being wished a Happy Birthday, or being told "I love you" when it's really directed at everyone. I particularly love that so many of the things that upset people at the time--troublesome members, mostly--have become sources of community bonding when we look back at them.
Some of the funniest days of my entire life have been spent here, reacting to some crazy thing someone said which the community picked up and ran with. That sort of thing isn't just my favorite part of this place, but it's my favorite part of the Internet in general. That's the kind of thing the Internet is good at. There's a lot of ugly stuff online, but when groups of people online are witnessing something together, and reacting and making good-natured jokes and being clever, and volleying the best responses around to each other, that's the medium at its best.
Is there currently a specific innovation or evolution when it comes to internet culture that you find particularly interesting/fascinating?
It's as upsetting as it is fascinating, but the rise of trolling is probably the most interesting thing. The lengths people will go to to procure attention or feel important or powerful is a disturbing window into human nature.
What are the advantages of exchanging information and having conversations within a more restricted (digital) community, like Movieforums, compared to doing those same things on larger (social media) platforms?
Forums encourage more substantive discussion, in ways large and small. The large way is that its asynchronous: you're not expected to reply right away. You might not even be online when a response comes in. This helps make responses more measured and thoughtful, in the way any response is if you're forced to breathe and count to 10 before giving it.
It does this in small ways, too: forum pages don't instantly refresh, there are tools that make it easy to quote someone directly, and find the source of that quote, and even the size of the text box hints that responses should be longer and more detailed (ours even stretches to accommodate longer messages).
Compare that to Facebook. Comments come in right away, there's a sound notification to make sure you see it immediately, text boxes are tiny, there's no good quote facility, and so on. Websites unconsciously tell their users how to use them in a thousand tiny ways, and everything about social media tells them "read this immediately and reply without thinking too much."
Why do you think there's still consistent activity on Movieforums, despite all the other, much larger (social media) platforms that have "taken the place" of many other forums. What is Movieforums doing right?
People who see movies want to talk about them. That will always be true. What Movie Forums does right is it recognizes this as the central reason it has to exist, and tries to facilitate it instead of throwing up roadblocks.
It's sounds simple and obvious, but most of what we do right is just avoiding so many of the things other sites do wrong.
Were there ever times when the site was struggling to stay relevant or even alive?
Probably not struggling to stay alive, because while it's occasionally taken up a lot of time, the costs of merely keeping it up and running have been pretty low. There have definitely been, over the years, a massive rush of movie websites popping up. We've outlasted almost all of them, but there's a steady flow of new blogs and news sites with stapled-on comment sections, and though most of them don't stick around or take away much, they can combine to make a real difference.
We tried to keep up with some of this for awhile, in the early days. We had a news section, for example. Eventually it became obvious this was going to be impossible, and that it made sense to emphasize the things you could only get here: the discussion. Now, virtually everything is tied into the forums in some way, because that's the thing fly-by-night news sites and blogs can't duplicate.
What about huge discussion platforms like Reddit? Have they been or are they a legitimate threat to smaller forum communities?
Certainly to some types of them. They're still very scaled down and simple; they're not as openly hostile to long form discussions as social media is, but they're still more for shorter exchanges of information, and there's a much weaker sense of identity on them. Forums have distinct personalities tied to avatars and post history; in reddit, you barely even notice the names. This has advantages, to be sure, but it also precludes a certain level of familiarity. Much harder to imagine people making friends there.
Would it be possible to create Movieforums and make it a success in today's internet climate?
I think so, because I think we're seeing some push back on social media, and a renewed desire for substantive, longer discussions. There's no doubt social media has cut back on forum activity overall, but it's mostly done this by outsourcing the messier and uglier parts of forum culture to other platforms entirely. What's left may be fewer people, but it's also people who are far better suited to a forum.
I don't think social media is going away, but I think in some senses it's already peaked. The only part of this question that gives me pause is how broad the topic of "movies" is now, given the size of the industry. I am very, very bullish on the future of niche forums. I'm a little more circumspect about the future of forums on larger topics. And "movies" straddle the line between those two. They're often niche (particularly when you're talking about real cinephiles), but they're so popular and culturally influential that everyone has an opinion on them, anyway.
Of course, leading a social platform like this also asks for moral judgement. You have to decide for yourself when someone (or something) is crossing a line. What's important to keep in mind when bearing such a responsibility?
Precedent. Your concern can never just be with resolving the current situation, but resolving it in a way that doesn't make future situations harder to resolve.
There's an old saying that "hard cases make bad law." No matter where you draw the line, there will be situations that make the rule look silly, but it'll look even sillier if you constantly try to modify it to draw around unusual situations.
You always say Movieforums is a PG-13 forum (referring to the Movie rating system). Do you think it's important for a digital social environment to not go beyond that in order to stay healthy?
I think the word "healthy" changes a lot depending on a forum's goals. If a forum values open expression above all else, then "healthy" might necessarily mean a lot of vulgarity or trolling. If it values substantive debate, the definition changes.
I think online communities with far more (or far fewer) restrictions than ours can be very valuable, and I often tell people who question the rules here that I completely understand and respect their choice to find another place, if they find it too restrictive.
The part I feel strongly about is that these rules have a major downstream effect on the quality of discussion. Technically, a few swear words here and there are not mutually exclusive with serious discussion, but I think they make it a good deal harder, and infect the discourse in ways that aren't going to be perfectly traceable or quantifiable.
The larger social platforms still get a lot of criticism about how they handle this 'moral judgement' task. Do you think they can learn something from smaller social platforms like Movieforums, despite the difference in scale?
I think that difference in scale is exactly what they can learn. The larger the group, the less tenable universal rules are going to be. At a certain point you're not managing or facilitating relationships, you're just herding. "Large community" is an oxymoron.
Do you still have some specific upcoming plans for Movieforums? Or did you ever use to have certain wild ambitions for this site that were never realized?
I have quite a few features in mind, yes. Some only became possible recently, and should go live this year. Mostly straightforward things like movie logs and fun things with aggregate data on ratings, lists, and favorites. But there are other ideas I've thought about off and on for years that might still happen. I have many long text files of ideas, both large and small.
My wildest ambitions have always been exponential growth, though over time I've wondered if that would really be good for the site, partially because of what I said earlier about large communities and problems of scale. But I do think it can be much bigger than it is now without losing its essence.
Let's end this interview on a personal note. Why did you never quit? What kept you going all these years?
There have been times I've wondered if it's worthwhile, since there's no way it's paid for itself if you factor in the amount of time spent. But I've learned so much running it, both technically and about people in general. That alone keeps it going. That, and a general curiosity about what happens to a site like this after so long. We're coming up on 20 years. That's almost unheard of. We're in mostly uncharted territory here. That, all by itself, feels like reason to keep going.
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__________________
Cobpyth's Movie Log ~ 2019
Cobpyth's Movie Log ~ 2019
Last edited by Cobpyth; 04-28-18 at 12:43 PM.
