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Is Letterboxd Becoming a Blockbuster? (nytimes.com) 28

Posted by msmash from the good-internet dept.
Early last decade, Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, web designers based in Auckland, New Zealand, were seeking a passion project. Their business, a boutique web design studio called Cactuslab, developed apps and websites for various clients, but they wanted a project of their own that their team could plug away at when there wasn't much else to do. From a report: Buchanan had an idea for a social media site about movies. At the time, he reflected, he used Flickr to share photos and Last.fm to share his taste in music. IMDb was a database; it wasn't, in essence, social. That left a gap in the field. The result was an app and social media network called Letterboxd, which its website describes, aptly, as "Goodreads for film." After it was introduced at the web conference Brooklyn Beta in the fall of 2011, Letterboxd steadily developed a modest but passionate following of film fans eager to track their movie-watching habits, create lists of favorites, and write and publish reviews. In 2020, however, the site's growth was explosive. Letterboxd has seen its user base nearly double since the beginning of the pandemic: They now have more than 3 million member accounts, according to the company, up from 1.7 million at this time last year.

The pandemic has ravaged the movie industry, as theaters have remained mostly shuttered and high-profile would-be blockbusters like "Tenet" have drastically underperformed. But for Letterboxd, all that time at home has been a boon. "We love talking about movies," said Gemma Gracewood, Letterboxd's editor in chief. "And we're talking even more about what we love lately because we're all stuck indoors." In the beginning, Letterboxd mainly attracted film obsessives: hard-core cinephiles, stats fanatics and professional critics looking to house their published work under one roof. Mike D'Angelo, a longtime contributor to Entertainment Weekly and Esquire, used Letterboxd to retroactively log every movie he has seen, by date, since January 1992. In addition to uploading his old reviews to the platform, he uses the site as a kind of diary for more off-the-cuff musings.
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Is Letterboxd Becoming a Blockbuster? More

Is Letterboxd Becoming a Blockbuster?

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  • Stupid Naming Fashion (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Expect competition from equally uncreatively named Letterboxly and Letterboxr.

  • Anybody remember when Netflix had this sort of thing built into their website? It was pretty cool, but apparently those of us who bothered to use it were something like 0.0000001 percent of their user base, so they axed it. A lot of people were mad, but not enough.

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    • Yep, I would peruse the reviews even if I didn't leave any, but I mostly miss their great 5 star rating system and how well it tied to their algorithm. It was pretty accurate and uncovered some films I probably would've missed, it also was a quick way to recommend films by looking at my ratings. I think they changed it because they knew their in-house productions would get crushed by it.
      • I think the netflix algorithms decline was that it was great when the only large user demographic was 'middle class working folks', and it took a shitter when the demographic became 'everyone on the planet' .. now it doesnt work well for anybody.

        For you data folks, consider that in the original case, most of the users of netflix already had similarities that went unmeasured by the algorithm, but the algorithms veracity benefitted from those unmeasured similarities anyways.

        Now that netflix is global and

  • Tin Foil Hat on (Score:3)

    by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Thursday January 14, 2021 @04:06PM (#60945092) Homepage

    Tin Foil Hat on :)

    After seeing the headline, a thought popped into my head, I wonder if MPAA had it out for Blockbuster and did what they can to cause it to fail.

    Why, because it is not that difficult to rip DVDs (and probably blueray) to create files to be shared by people.

    Now almost all media is streamed, probably from providers you pay. And one can 'buy' movies from Comcast, which I am sure they track how much you watch your "purchases".

    • I wonder if MPAA had it out for Blockbuster and did what they can to cause it to fail.

      Why, because it is not that difficult to rip DVDs (and probably blueray) to create files to be shared by people.

      Netflix still offers a DVD/Blu-Ray by mail [netflix.com] service, so I'd guess, "Probably not."

      • > Netflix still offers a DVD/Blu-Ray by mail [netflix.com] service

        I wish that was still viable. When they got rid of 3/4 of their distribution centers, its cost effectively doubled.

        Turns out most people are happy with finding something to watch, not finding the thing they want to watch.

  • for data gathering and privacy invasion.

  • As soon as I read the words "Becoming a Blockbuster" in the headline of a story about a movie-related business, I immediately interpreted that as a comparison with Blockbuster Video, the movie-rental chain that died a slow death at the hands of Redbox, Netflix, and eventually online streaming. I assumed the story was that Letterboxd was about to share the same fate as Blockbuster Video.

    However, it turns out that Letterboxd is "doing very well". I think the euphemism we are looking for is "going gangbust

    • > However, it turns out that Letterboxd is "doing very well". I think the euphemism we are looking for is "going gangbusters".

      Your version is clearer, but a 'blockbuster' movie is a very successful one (in terms of magnitude/revenue/tickets/viewers/etc). And the site is about movies ... so. It kinda works.

      • I do think it is interesting that Blockbuster is such a well known failure that the company's failure has tarnished the word, which they'd originally chosen because it means something akin to "raging success."

  • The fad is over. It got its five years of fame. Nobody wants 'social media' anymore. We have realized it is anti-social *by definition* now. Look at the youth: Not using social media has become like not smoking was to us. It's stomething that fashion leaders do, and everyone might not yet be there but everyone dreams of getting there and getting rid of the addiction. Social media's time is over. But like a dead 100-ton dinosaur, it takes a few years to cool down.

  • IMDB got rid of it (Score:3)

    by sixsixtysix ( 1110135 ) on Thursday January 14, 2021 @06:24PM (#60945758)
    IMDB used to have a nice comment section for each entry.
  • I'm a movie enthousiast, but I've never heard of this Letterboxd until this /. article, so I have a feeling it's more an advert than a real article.

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