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IMDb

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has been around forever — over 15 years if I remember correctly, paleolithic by net standards. When I first came online in 1994, it was already here and became one of my favorite sites. It is the very first thing that pops into my head when I want to get info about movies. Talk about mindshare.

Recently, they threw their discussion boards and some other stuff behind a registration wall. While a bit disappointing, this was hardly the end of the world — the “discussions” there usually consist of fanboi and trolls going at each other. Good for a laugh, though not funny enough to justify yet another site registration.

I could bugmenot to get around this, if I really felt like it. Do I?

Eh.

What caught my eye, though, were the bullet points under WHY REGISTER? on that reg page. Here they are:

  • Discuss your favorite celebrity, film, or TV show on our boards
  • Rate movies from 1 (awful) to 10 (great)!
  • Create and manage movie lists. Catalog your DVD collection.
  • Vote in the poll to let your voice be heard!
  • Find out what’s playing near you (and at what time) with our personalized showtimes
  • Submit information on your favorite movies, shows, and celebrities.

Sooooo, let’s see… the reason I should give you demographic marketing tracking information about myself is so I can enjoy forum flamefests, submit meaningless rating votes, create lists that could be done in any text editor, submit meaningless poll votes to let my voice be heard, get showtimes that I can get on pretty much every third site on the Internet…. and finally, so I can write content for you.

I know that if I don’t facilitate corporations with the means to track my every thought and whim, the terrorists have already won, but allow me a bit of meaningless dissent: let your voice be heard at the real polls. You know the ones with the cool privacy booths where the old folks are pleasantly surprised to see you show up? Yeah, you remember, that whole democratic society thing you slogged through in high school.

Now if you will excuse me, I am going to go back to reading Ocean’s Twelve trivia. Did you know Brad Pitt’s cellphone in the movie has a ringtone of “Pretty In Pink” by the Psychedelic Furs?