And in other news, the NY Times is trying to buy Letterboxd for a reported price of $330 million.
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Comments 3
I was in that first wave of beta users of Letterboxd, and we had this great little community that reminded me of the early Internet: lovely, thoughtful reviews, and relatively civil comments (for the most part). I felt like we all got to know each other. And then the inevitable Eternal September happened after beta (as it always does), and a certain generation came of age and found the site, and instead of thoughtful reviews, we started getting funny one-liners in a race to get the most likes and top review on a movie page (Letterboxd encouraged this engagement btw). Most of the old timers stopped posting and that early community faded away. Getting acquired by big media feels like the inevitable denouement— a story as old as, well, the Web (which I’ve been around for all of). And like I’ve done many times before I shall export my data and it shall live in a file on my hard drive next to those other exports—Delicious/Pinboard bookmarks, Foursquare/Swarm check-ins, Google Reader feeds json, Twitter export, ICQ/AIM/MSN Messenger chats, etc. I certainly don’t begrudge the founders their exit. It is the way of things.
I am a latecomer to letterboxd: I think I got an account last year as I decided I wanted a place to keep records of films I've seen and want to see.
So I'm well post eternal-september. And I think you're being a little unfair to it, just as I and others were probably unfair to usenet post eternal-september. It's fine: not all the reviews are great, some are clearly karma farming, but really it does its job pretty well. What killed usenet, after all, was not eternal september but spam, much later.
If it gets bought by the NY Times I probably will leave, though.
Obviously, companies get taken over all the time, for better or worse – see that Worse on Purpose site you posted, for example. But there's something about social websites/services getting bought that feels more personal and more sad. It's more akin to your favourite bar or cafe getting taken over by a chain than a manufacturer of backpacks getting bought. Even if there's a promise that "Nothing's going to change." It will.
OK, I'm still sad that Amazon bought IMDb in 1998.
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