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I missed the beta discussion on M&TV, and I just discovered the site today.

I've also been a long-time user of the IMDB forums.

What are the main reasons for creating M&TV, when IMDB discussion boards (example link for Matrix (1999)) have a large user base and considerable amounts of content?

Note that I'm personally happy that M&TV exists, because IMDB forums suffer from very poor user experience, including deleting threads allegedly due to storage limitations (!). My efforts of trying to get IMDB to stop this have been ignored, despite asking in the forums and writing an open letter to IMDB.

Aside from these two considerations, were IMDB message boards considered when creating M&TV SE, and if so, what were the reasons for its creation?

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    For the record: IMDB forums died on Feb 2017 imdb.com/board/announcement – leonbloy Feb 24 '17 at 12:45
  • @leonbloy: "The IMDb message boards were disabled on February 20, 2017. This included the Private Message system. IMDb is passionately committed to providing innovative ways for our hundreds of millions of users to engage and communicate with one another." - my ass. Glad they finally died. – Dan Dascalescu Feb 25 '17 at 22:03
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To a degree, the answer to this can be 'competition'. IMDB and StackExchange are completely different sites run by different businesses - there is no reason why a rationale is needed at all. Even if the purpose behind the sites were identical, they could just be alternatives to each other. However the reasoning behind M&TV and the IMDB forums is somewhat different.

The main argument that I would put forward is that StackExchange is not a forum / discussion board. It is a Question and Answer site that attempts to provide answers not just discussion. This is why you can edit someone else's posts - the idea is to refine and improve upon the posts here. The format and ethos here actively discourages the forum style discussion based threads, preferring that this goes into the chat part of the site. You won't find questions that are entirely opinion based here, like recommendations, or 'I like movie x because' style posts here, which are perfectly accepted on IMDB.

  • +1, sure we may both exist to get to an answer, but how we get there is completely different. – user1887 Feb 24 '13 at 18:49
  • This becomes oh so obvious when actually taking a look into "discussions" on IMDb. You usually end up with a continuous thread of messages, multiple pages long, from which about 5 messages buried in the midst contain actual information and the rest is only one "Hitler" or "fuck" away from a YouTube comment thread. That is certainly not what SE is. – Napoleon Wilson♦ Sep 29 '16 at 12:26

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