"We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards" - <AUTHOR> http://www.imdb.com/board/announcement <comment><USER3> Thumbs down to whoever decided to close the boards.

I'll miss being able to argue about why a movie is rubbish with someone who thinks it's fantastic, or vice-versa.

There's some great discussions on some of the movie boards where people talk about the stories and motivations of characters etc. Sure it gets heated sometimes, but that's life. You just navigate around that stuff and find things worth responding to.

Sending people to "Facebook" is not an alternative as there is no facility to divide discussion per thousands of movies over there, and... it's Facebook, the fast food of online discussion. It's designed more for small packets of latest buzz more than dedicated threaded topics. What a joke IMDB, they should fix their boards with post-limits, voting up/down posts, and community moderation.

<comment><USER4> Head to [https://letterboxd.com](https://letterboxd.com) — besides looking and working beautifully, it's designed from the ground up as a social movie site to find, review, track and share great (and awful) watches. The list functionality is superb — Best car chases? Submarine films? Movies where white people solve racism? Got it.

<comment><USER5> This looks interesting, as I use imdb mainly for lists, and they are too inconsistent to me - there's a watchlist, but no watched-list, for example. Or I haven't found it, because the ui is so inconsistent. Does Letterboxd have the option to export your activity / lists?

<comment> blubb-fish the watched list is the list with your ratings.

<comment><USER5> That's not the same, as I rarely rate movies I've watched.

<comment><USER6> on TMDb you have discussions, can import watchlist and ratings from IMDb lots you can create any list you want (watched but not rated as you mention for instance) plus of course it has discussions for each movie

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Developed/ran a message board software for 4 years.

Running a large message board network is one of the worst experiences I have ever had. You are constantly wasting time moderating people, blocking people, recalculating algorithms, dealing with attacks and explaining to the police you don't have the IP address in question. Every large message board I have developed or managed revolted or sued us ([1][2] random example revolts). One of the largest being niketalk.com. THIS, while making NO MONEY. Users that use generic message boards are extremely hostile towards ads and refuse to pay for anything. _EVERYTHING_ done by the moderators is overblown and people working there are publicly quartered.

Yeah no thanks. I would have removed the boards too - then got a coffee.

[1] [http://mashable.com/2010/08/30/users-revolt-against-new- digg...](http://mashable.com/2010/08/30/users-revolt-against-new- digg/#IbYcilA7MkqY)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/07/reddit- re...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/07/reddit-revolt-ellen- pao-fate)

<comment><USER8> I developed and ran social networking features for a fashion site with an almost entirely female audience, age range 20-50. I was fully expecting bad behavior but was surprised as it grew that people were unfailingly nice, supportive and encouraging to each other, with only a few exceptions. Of course I'm aware that females, like anyone else, can be nasty to each other, but it barely happened here with membership in the thousands. It would be an interesting social experiement to replicate that on a larger scale while limiting the demographic by gender, age, and so on to see how it affects the behavior of the group.

<comment><USER9> I would guess fashion-interest is a better selector for positive interaction than female. Try an all-female board about veganism and watch them eat each other alive in a race to the righteousness bottom.

<comment><USER10> Seems pretty civil and reasonable to me: [https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/4hnzyz/why_are_most_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/4hnzyz/why_are_most_vegans_women/)

<comment><USER11> Reddit doesn't really work like a traditional forum. In a traditional forum everybody has the same visibility, in reddit it's very easy to create like- minded communities because anything controversial gets out of view very fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is pretty bad move and here's why: IMDb relies on users using the site, editing entries, facts, quotes and correcting things.

These are the community, and they are movie fans, hardcore fans, the reason why IMDb continues. The "db" in IMDb has been created, by hand, by volunteers - the users who use the message board.

IMDb has totally overlooked the value of the Message Boards - they are for the community. Remove this and IMDb as a whole will suffer.

Consider this comparison: Imagine if Wikipedia said that it was only going to have Facebook logins for editors. All user pages were being deleted, no user meetups were allowed and no meta discussion about pages was allowed, but only that normal articles, the main thing non editors read were to be kept. Thats a stretched comparison - the idea is the the message boards are how the community works, not just some little addon that non community members don't use.

<comment><USER13> It would be like Y Combinator shutting down its "message board", citing " _Increasingly, Y Combinator customers have migrated to Reddit_ "

<comment><USER14> If hacker news doesn't stem the growth of trolling (which has pushed out plenty of my friends) then it probably will eventually "shut down" new signups for a while.

<comment><USER15> Odd, I don't see a lot of blatant trolling on HN at all. Care to name some examples?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is incredibly sad news. I have been a regular reader of IMDb message boards for over 15 years now. It's the last actual forum that I still visit.

There's so much valuable information stored on those boards, it's a tragedy to see it get deleted. Sure the most popular movie threads might be filled with toxic flamewars, but the long tail of more obscure movies has reasonable discussion and human recommendations of other similar movies. It's precisely this why I'm extra sad about this whole situation. It's not difficult to find a community to talk about the next Star Wars, but there aren't really any places where discussion (in English) about 20 years old Dutch movies happens.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. The good finds on the boards are worth the bad contributions - <USER2> could be managed with a bit of effort and changing the format.

The value of attaching discussion to a movie database is unmatched by any alternative.

Take for example the old obscure film Stalker (1979). We see discussions 4 pages long about the meaning of the dog in the film. Or this one, "Other 'visually beautiful' films?", and people respond with suggestions. This information will be lost, and the opportunity to create similar threads in a sensible place in context with the movie, also lost.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/board/thread/138657635](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/board/thread/138657635)?

<comment><USER17> 'Stalker' is not an 'old obscure film' and reams have been written about it. For instance, a recent book - [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/books/review/geoff- dyers-z...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/books/review/geoff-dyers-zona- examines-the-film-stalker.html)

<comment><USER3> The point I was making is that non-mainstream films released a long time ago still have active quality ongoing discussion on IMDB.

I didn't invest a lot time choosing an example film. You're not happy with my choice in Stalker, then replace it with whatever you like that happens to have good discussion on the boards. Perhaps "Celine and Julie go Boating (1974)" would qualify as obscure...

Is anything considered obscure anymore? Before the internet if you wanted to watch Salo (Pasolini), you'd be out of luck unless some film festival was showing it. Now you can just grab the torrent and head to IMDB to join the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Anthony-G Another nail in the coffin for the open web!

As I mentioned in another comment [1], I read the discussion threads but have never actually contributed to them. I can easily click a link to view all past discussion related to the film I'm interested in without having to sign up and become a member. This would be impossible in Facebook or Twitter where discussion is ephemeral, not conducive to thoughtful expression and not intended for archival or organisation.

It's a real shame that IMDB are just going to remove the boards. Even if they didn't want to allocate resource for maintaining a community, IMDB could have opted to make the forums read-only and keep them as an archive for posterity.

On a tangential note, IMDB is one of the few sites where I see ads because they're not using third-party trackers (as far as Privacy Badger can tell).

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571893#13572081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571893#13572081)

<comment><USER18> Agreed on keeping them up. Even if just for the SEO value and organic traffic.

<comment><USER6> i never stumbled upon in boards in Google search results, are they even searchable from outside?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Translation:

"We thought we would get a community of fans for free. We didn't realize that maintaining a community requires active engagement, setting rules for behavior and enforcing them. We really didn't think anyone would bother being a troll. This is all too expensive to do properly."

<comment><USER20> i think it might have something to do with litigation. Wikipedia says that they have been sued by actors that got their age revealed on the message board [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMDb#Litigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMDb#Litigation)

And now California has a new anti-ageism law; wikipedia says "The bill forces IMDb to comply with requests by the actors featured on its pages to remove information about their age"

so they might have decided to close the message board for fear of litigation.

<comment><USER21> So it's less work to simply just destroy one of the most used online forums because a few actors in California feel like they're too old.

<comment><USER22> For one, complying with the law is pretty important. For another, when your livelihood is based on (to a non-trivial extent) your physical characteristics and appearance, having your age revealed, and possibly aging you out of more glamorous roles, is an important protection to ensure.

<comment><USER23> I have no idea why this was down voted, it seems like it was a calculated decision. Litigation can destroy a company (just ask Gawker). Being responsible, legally with consequences, for monitoring the entirety of your site for age disclosure is expensive. Not only to do it, but the cost of litigation for when you miss one. That's probably a big part of the calculation.

Someone suggested that it's because moderating is expensive, which is true, but IMDB has been moderating their site for a long time. I don't think the cost of standard moderation was a big part in the calculation, simply because they have been doing it successfully for years. I think they are also aware of the value of their message boards simply by tracking page hits.

Having said that, public figures are excluded from privacies generally granted to the public. There are plenty of public records of everyone that discloses their age, even though they are not a public figure. To pass a law requiring IMDB remove age disclosure with consequences is very bad law. Not only that, the people that are the "victims" have the financial ability to litigate. It's even worse if other publications like tabloids are excluded from this requirement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is incredulous they are calling two weeks notice "ample time" for people to organise alternative contacts with friends they may only know via a handle and manually archive their years of messages. I expected better from IMDb.

<comment><USER25> I would be very surprised if your issue was even realized or considered.

<comment><USER26> It explicitly says that it was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Perhaps I'm oldfashioned but all the discussions that happen on the "social web" are very scattered, volatile and basically instantly forgotten. So I don't really find that a good argument to delete these archives. That they're overal low-quality discussions, that's true, though.

I guess it has more to do with "Focus", and that comes before "Nostalgia".

<comment><USER28> I agree. Keeping archives of decade old arguments between random strangers seems like a waste of digital resources. It's like taking and storing minutes for the water cooler conversations in your office. I wonder how many petabytes of forum content there is out there on the web

<comment><USER29> > seems like a waste of digital resources

Yes, that's exactly the same what Sumerians did say back a few 1000 years ago. Why keep all these clay tables about ordering wine? Who is gonna be interested in that kind of stuff in 10 years?

Don't you think that such an archive would offer a nice glimpse into our current culture a few hundred years in the future?

<comment><USER30> I've posted about this in other places on this thread, but after feeling the same way as you, I looked at some old movies, and found that most posts are fairly recent. It turns out that IMDB has been expiring posts all along.

Your argument is sound though. Comments on websites, even if filled with trolls and fakes ought to be treated with respect and saved for posterity, since they give an important insight into the current zeitgeist.

<comment><USER31> Oh, I don't know. I was a daily user of Usenet for years, but the vast majority of the time I don't miss it. (Yes, I know Google still has some unevenly preserved and mostly difficult to access portion of the content.)

Here's the point: if you put some of the great content that was created there 25 or 30 years ago in front of the current generation, what is the general reaction? A yawn, that's what.

It might be fascinating in a few thousand years, but I won't be around then, and the planet might not be either, so why should I care?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's a pity, the boards of not popular movies sometimes had very interesting discussions. I got in the habit always check the message boards after watching a movie.

I've never really posted though, just been a lurker. I hope the Internet Archive archives this in some form.

<comment> Anthony-G It's the same for me. I've never posted because usually other contributors have already provided interesting observations or interpretations. If I have a question, odds are someone else in the past two decades has already asked the same question. While, I've noticed the quality of the discussion in inversely proportional to the popularity of the film, even for mainstream films you can identify the useless threads quickly enough or back away if/when they get derailed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've found some of my favorite movies on iMDB in recommended movies threads. It's sad that they don't think it's worth it to keep. I get that their forums are infested with trolls, but they could just relaunch it on new a platform. Hell take discourse, pick some good posters as moderators, move the good threads and archive the rest. Amazon is already doing the forum thing on DPreview, why can't they just copy the concept to iMDB?!

<comment><USER34> > Amazon is already doing the forum thing on DPreview, why can't they just > copy the concept to iMDB?!

Can you elaborate? I checked out the DPReview forums[1]. They seemed solid enough, but no obvious connection to Amazon.

Does AWS have some forum-as-a-service product I'm not aware of?

[1] [https://www.dpreview.com/forums](https://www.dpreview.com/forums)

<comment><USER3> Amazon acquired Dpreview in 2007, but as far as I can tell it didn't change anything to do with the site or forums. Those forums have pretty much remained unchanged for a long time.

Less trolls on forums where the subject matter is focused, and requires interest in digital photography. IMDB subject matter can be anything related to movies including how hot this or that actor is, or how ugly or crap they are! This will spawn heated debate, but that's fine by me. A sad loss, the IMDB forums are amusing and reveal a lot of varied opinion and expression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The younger generation or even people newer at the internet never learned how valuable those boards where. IMDb failed with the newer generation and that's why they are shuting them down (the fact that they have to spend resources to keep them up doesn't help either). The comments here (up until now at least) are a representation of their failure as everyone states that nothing of value was lost and most didn't bother with IMDb's boards ever (Hacker News' biggest audience IS that younger generation).

<comment><USER6> project on HN apparently don't watch movie or search superhero crap and other sophisticated stuff, otherwise it's hard to understand why would anyone agree with shutting boards where movie fans discuss movies, especially those less known and especially since there is ZERO alternative to easily find discussion board for some obscure movie you just watched where would anyone head

<comment><USER6> people... watch...

can't edit my comment in my HN client

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Amazon, the owner of IMDB, does not understand the value of community, apparently seeing it as a cost instead of as an opportunity. So instead of taking advantage of the knowledge and interest of 250 million users, they have given that community to Facebook. Instead, they should have given better tools to their users by making IMDB into a social network for movies. What a waste.

</comment><comment><USER37> Archive Team link: [http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=The_Internet_Movi...](http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=The_Internet_Movie_Database)

</comment><comment><USER38> If bulletin board software was made today and was free of the archetypes and styles of the 90's and 2000's would they be more popular today? Spent a lot of time on them during those years and I still find valuable information there whether it's how to fix a car or what strategy should I use to play a certain game.

I think these communities were more tight-knit. They had some modicum of moderation as you typically had to sign up and typically you had to be a good citizen for a while before posting threads. This is in comparison to many social media where you can begin trolling with little to no effort.

Reddit favors gamification or conforming to popular opinion. Many of the forums I frequented didn't have any sort of rep other than post count and maybe join date to see seniority.

I see a lot of sites I used to visit go this way including the forums for Magic: the Gathering. Based on user numbers and the rise of social media platforms they are very likely going to substitute for the old tight-knit forums of yesteryear.

<comment><USER39> Discussion boards also provide much longer-lasting content. Twitter and Facebook are totally ephemeral.

Reddit content seems to be somewhat valid even after the discussion has ceased, but once discussion leaves a subreddit front page it basically dies. That applies to HN too, of course. Discussion boards usually resurface a topic when someone answers, resulting in a longer discussion and a chance to revisit the topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> They seem to be adopting the same public comment that NPR did when they shutdown comments - "we aren't shutting it down but rather we are simply 'migrating' community engagement to Twitter(and perhaps other social media outlets.)"

I find relegating community engagement to Twitter creates an uneven experience in that I have to go "out of band" to participate when I am already on the IMDB site. Also discussing movies(or any art form for that matter) via 140 characters is hard for me personally to take seriously.

I wish they had provided numbers for the volume that uses the comments section vs Twitter as it would have been interesting.

Maybe this change will create an opportunity for an alternate movie site?

</comment><comment><USER41> This just shows how Amazon is only interested in selling movies, not building communities. Can someone recommend any other movie forum with similiar scale?

<comment><USER42> Since the announcement I've looked and haven't found anything. This is a huge bummer since the value in the comments were discussions outside of the larger movies.

I've learned many things about movies I've enjoyed and appreciated the other takes of movies I hadn't thought of.

If you do come across something, please let us know.

<comment><USER6> check trakt.tv comments and support this feature in TMDb discussion

[https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5894e6e0c3a368089b000e1e?pag...](https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5894e6e0c3a368089b000e1e?page=3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This would be a good opportunity for someone to build an independent message board layer similar to gitter or genius. Its been tried before unsuccessfully but sooner or later someone will get it right. As the web becomes more closed, this could be a platform for more open discussion.

<comment><USER6> the thing is it must have already big database of movies and enough users, only other sites meeting this are rotten tomatoes (disabled read only forums so apparently not interested), TMDb (nothing, seem they are not interested in this opportunity judging by discussion in their forum), Metacritic (nothing), Letterboxd (nothing and too few users) and trakt.tv (has threaded comments for specific movies, but also not that many users)

i talked with my friend running one of the biggest subtitles website who had obviously enough database of movies and TV shows, but he ain't interested because of legal responsibility for content of comments and need of expensive moderation, though i would think this could be outsourced to Disqus and legally comments would be stored on their servers

<comment><USER44> I think the PP is referring to an independent, content agnostic system for layering discourse and messaging on top of third-party content systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I wonder if the current revolution in AI will accidentally kill online message boards.

Here's the line of reasoning. Some of these steps are probably already occurring.

\- It will be easy write a bot that understands what's being said.

\- A bot can follow many threads at once, multiplying the reading workload for humans.

\- A bot can pull large amounts of information together into a cogent argument, or at least one that cannot be dismissed by a human without a fair few minutes of reading. For instance, if I want to troll people by coming with reasons why women should not be allowed to vote, my bot could spin a yarn about how Switzerland is an advanced industrial country that only in 1991 allowed its remaining women to vote. I could pull data about women being left- leaning, more emotional, and so on. And the data needn't actually be true, I can quote sources with wrong numbers, create new sources, and so on. You, the interested debater, would have to follow this pile of crap and debunk each item, eating up your whole evening.

\- In order to defeat such a bot, someone will invent a fact-checking bot (Like a GAN, it could decide whether you were botting your argumentation). Sounds good, but wait. A fact-checking bot would have to present its side of the story. And how would it do that? Just like a human, here's your points, here's why they're wrong, here's the actual facts, and so on.

\- So now every message board is bots talking to bots.

\- Humans will have to fall back to heuristics, like "read the first line and decide if there's a point". But of course a bot can figure out what the weaknesses in your heuristics are.

\- People will get sick of writing on boards, because well, they're not for people.

</comment><comment><USER46> IMDb's message boards have terrible UX and are mostly devoid of good content. That said, I wonder how loyal posters on the boards will take this. I can't imagine how frustrated I'd be with a site if they suddenly decided to delete 10 or 20 years of my commenting history. E.g. what if HN or Reddit decided to delete comments and just kept story links?

<comment><USER6> as active user using boards for 14 years it's very frustrating, i don't really care much about past comments, but about inability to discuss anything new i will watch, it's part of movie watching experience, without all those discussions you don't know how much you missed during watching movie

i can only hope other major website (tmdb, RT, trakt.tv, metscritic) will take advantage of this and introduce boards for specific movies and TV shows (never used general imdb boards), because essentially imdb is dead for me since February 20, i can have ratings and watchlist anywhere, only reason i really kept going there were discussions

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Another piece of Internet History gets deleted, that's a pity. Personally it literally was the very first url I memorized back in IE3 times, and eventually first online user account as well (June 1999, wow, time flies).

</comment><comment><USER48> Strategic mistake. The so-called "open web", even with crude user interfaces, is a more credible source of information than easily manipulated and falsified "news" feeds on closed platforms like FB.

</comment><comment><USER49> STOP BEING SAD!

I mean, stop being sad as in feeling defeated. It's not an end, it's a problem in the continuation. You are hackers, and the announcement gives a very clear clue as to what you can do to solve this problem; archive the content, mirror it, and launch your own decentralized movie discussion platform!

Think about how The Pirate Bay is backed up these days; dozens of TPB mirrors exist to guarantee the continued existence of the service. Decentralization is good. This is good as in it's good to be reminded not to put your eggs in a centralized (and commercially motivated) basket!

</comment><comment><USER6> The Movie database (TMDb) added yesterday (February 6th) Discussions functionality for each title (movie/TV show).

[https://www.themoviedb.org/](https://www.themoviedb.org/)

You will find it in top left of the page next to poster under Discussions button with Bubble icon, so feel free leave IMDb which abandoned users and plan to delete their content.

You can return back to movie page by clicking on name of movie. Discussions have two categories - General, for general topics regarding movie, Content issues is self explanatory regarding content on main page.

Link from mobile view is currently NOT available, should be rolled out today accoding admin (Travis Bell) words. As temporary solution you can add "discuss" in the end of mobile URL.

I am not in any way affiliated with TMDb and registered there like 2 days ago when finding sad news that IMDb is going to delete my comments I wrote for 14 years and what's worse won't let me discuss movies with other movie fans.

After doing research of alternatives (Rotten Tomatoes, MetaCritic, Letterboxd, Trakt.tv and other) I consider TMDb the best alternative to move on with your ratings, watchlists and discussions, none of other sites mentioned earlier have proper discussions, only other alternativ are threaded comments at Trakt.tv.

</comment><comment><USER50> It seems crazy that in this time of wanting to hoard and mine user data Amazon (who owns imbd) would close down a direct channel for collecting user information.

If trolls really were the issue then why not use that as an opportunity to devise a new bot to watch and moderate that. amazon is always exploring new ways to use machine learning and this could have been a great use case.

It all seems to go against their core principles.

</comment><comment><USER51> This is such a terrible idea. By far the main reason I go to IMDb is to see and participate in the discussions on the movie I just watched.

<comment><USER52> Really?

By far the main reason I go to IMDb is to look up actors and movies. And when I did accidentally see a comment, it was usually pretty low-quality.

<comment><USER6> there are tons of alternatives if you just look for movies and actors without discussion - letterboxd, rotten tomatoes, metacritic, etc

TMDb would be one of them, plus now they launched discussions for each title, so i am moving there,i like the free concept managed by users like Wikipedia

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Hi all! I am a co-founder of Trakt and I thought you would all like to know our thoughts on this.

We are planning on significantly revamping our community engagement experience. In fact, it is our most significant project for 2017 and we sketched out the plan over a weekend last month.

Trakt has a form of threaded discussion on our web app today. But of course, it has a long way to go before it can fill the shoes of IMDB. The feedback we are seeing here about what people appreciated about IMDB is extremely helpful, so please do keep it coming, or feel free to reach out to us directly. That said, our approach will be different from traditional forum-style discussions because we see an opportunity to vastly improve the experience by following the lead of today's well-executed communities.

Of course, our intention is to facilitate discussions within Trakt that are categorized within specific media like a TV episode, a movie, and likely more options such as directors and actors. While doing so, we have two major priorities that I hope will set us apart from what you previously had available to you:

1) A community built on respect and reputation. A great example is Product Hunt, where I can always count on having a productive discussion should I decide to provide feedback to a maker or hunter.

2) A composition experience that helps you make beauty out of words. Of course, Medium has done a wonderful job with this and I hope to apply some of the lessons learned from their platform as it has evolved.

In the meantime, if you're interested in seeing your IMDB data imported to your Trakt account, there are multiple members of our community who have built wonderful tools to enable you to do this. Here's one: [https://github.com/damienhaynes/TraktRater](https://github.com/damienhaynes/TraktRater)

Thank you!

<comment><USER6> trakt is cool, but it's more on side of sharing and social aspect, i was recommending your website until TMDb launched their discussions, since it's closest alternative to IMDb (plus as bonus pretty open platform), you have there movie and actors info plus you have proper discussions since yesterday

diversification and competition is healthy but too much fragmentation ain't good either

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I understand the gigantic task of moderating boards on the scale that IMDB's probably were, but social network accounts are definitely no substitute as history on these is not tuned for searching. They're flat streams of haphazard comments to whatever is posted on these accounts.

I just now chose to search IMDB's Facebook page for "Star Wars The Force Awakens" for a recent huge movie, using IMDB's supposed "replacement" to these forums. It ought to get no better than this. Top three results:

1\. Which film do you think will be the next $2 billion dollar movie?

2\. John Boyega to star in Pacific Rim 2

3\. Daisy Ridley to star in novel adaption Chaos Walking

None of these are even about the movie I searched, much less a focused discussion! It's completely useless. But that's not because Facebook's search engine is bad. It's searching what has been posted. No, it's because Facebook is not a search engine for catalogued knowledge to begin with. Why? Because Facebook doesn't even contain organized information. It's the wrong tool for this job. It's like going to a pub to extract information rather than going to a library.

This is in extent a problem I've felt has grown worse lately. The big social networks are eating up the web which is not only a loss due to consolidation and reliance on what the giants decide to do (a ton of eggs in very few baskets), but because social networks are tuned to be live or at best "the fresh of today". That works when chatting daily with friends, but not to look up thoughts and opinions on a movie from 1995, or anything else for that matter.

There is also a conceptual difference here, even if social networks did catalogue information to be browsable. They usually work as advertisement platforms and people write reactionary comments, while on a message board people go there in order to indulge themselves in a discussion or get questions answered = much higher discussion quality. Even if the IMDB boards weren't exactly always top quality, they were often much better than the swamps of Facebook.

<comment><USER6> TMDb which is in service since 2008 just launched discussions for movies and TV shows, feel free to discuss them there, it's also pretty open system which style be preferred by HN readership

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Eh. They were mostly people starting threads with the title "This movie sucks." Not much valuable discussion there.

<comment><USER56> The signal to noise ratio was poor, but there _was_ some signal. It would be a tragedy for it to be deleted.

<comment><USER55> I think tragedy is going a bit too far. Unfortunate for some hardcore fans, sure, but some things are just not worth keeping around and most of those things are message boards.

It's time to admit that message boards, as a genre of open-web feature, are a failure without clear topics and strict codes of conduct.

IMBd's boards had neither, and I'm glad to see them go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Mixed feelings about this.

I'll miss inane arguments about movies, but I'll be glad to see the back of the "Oh she's growing up fine" comments on under age actresses' profiles. Creepers are creepy.

</comment><comment><USER58> And not much of value was lost. Those boards had terrible usability. IIRC not long ago you could only see one comment per page and had to click on every single comment to read the thread.

That changed a little while ago but you still have multi-pages for comments and it's hard to keep track of who replies to whom. They also have these weird signatures which are completely impossible to distinguish from the body of the comment unless the poster used a different color or something.

Not that the discussions were generally very insightful, mostly celebrity gossip and flamewars.

<comment><USER59> Not a great loss, but it's amusing to read imdb's definition of "ample time" to backup anything of value.

<comment><USER30> IMDB's been expiring messages all along, so there isn't much there to backup. After reading this announcment, I wanted to save the fanboy comments for Cloverfield (2008) back from when it was first released, since I regard it as a classic example of the phenomenon, and they are already long-gone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I know that a lot of people don't frequent the boards so they might not see value in them, but I have a few experiences over the years that endeared this community to me. One was right after watching the second movie in the Matrix trilogy: the cliffhanger left so many open questions that the conversations around it were immensely interesting. I think actually that a few of the theories then (Zion in a zion and others) ended up being way more interesting than what actually happened in the third movie. In fact I think the Watchowskis were reading and following these theories themselves too or maybe I'm not remembering that correctly (it's been a while).

Another interesting one was right after watching Primer. A movie like that is meant to be talked about. I remember reading these boards and watching the movie again because there were so many interesting theories about what happened.

These are only two instances but over the years there were so many others where I'd watch a movie and then go to read about theories about the plot. The movie has to have a plot worth discussing for this to have value though, so in as non-condescending way as possible I wonder if perhaps people don't value that type of movie any more at all. Or maybe the number of boards where nothing interesting is being said dwarfs the ones that do. I don't know is, but I do feel like this is a huge loss because there are so many theories that will be lost forever.

<comment><USER61> Agreed. One of the only times I contributed to the board was on a thread discussing why time travel in Timecrimes[1] (superb movie!) was not consistent. Without spoiling it, we ended up discussing all sorts of alternate theories in an attempt to have it make sense.

Another cool thing is visiting the boards of interesting movies or shows that are still far out from release. You usually find details about estimated release date based on current progress and photos from production.

[1]: [http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0480669/](http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0480669/)

<comment><USER6> yep, time crimes was very good, i remember very good discussions also in The Prestige board regarding teleportation

btw TMDb just launched discussions yesterday so feel free to participate there, of course don't expect years of comments, but feel free to copy interesting topics you made from IMDb

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I have no idea why we decided that everyone who makes content or provides a service must also be great at moderating commenting systems.

Disaggregating comment from content is a great move for the web. It's part of the process of offloading commenting systems to people who are good at running them.

There's no reason we couldn't eventually have a browser plugin that appends a forum to a side-panel on every page online. In fact, Google had one of those, called Sidewiki. It was one of the most visionary ideas for the web that no one ever used.

<comment><USER63> "I have no idea why we decided that everyone who makes content or provides a service must also be great at moderating commenting systems."

I think the key here is this has been one of, if not the biggest movie rating / db site in the world for years and years and they won't do it. This isn't some poor bloke in his basement struggling to moderate, it's a massively popular website that should have some resources.

Everyone doesn't have to be great at moderating when they start up forums, but a hugely trafficked website that's been there forever should maybe get a handle on it, if they've been offering it for a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Sad. Usually when I have some question after having watched a movie, I can find the answer on the forum. But it seems all good movies have been made anyway. Maybe the era of movies are over.

<comment><USER6> plenty of good movies are still released each year, just the ratio of good vs the rest seem worse than in past or it's maybe nostalgia and i an becoming old, for instance recent Arrival was decent movie

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Its tragic when every niche web facility gets axed because it isn't mainstream enough. This is what gives us watered-down media and bland food. Aim for the middle is ok, you gotta survive in the market - but to actively axe the ends of the bell-curve is irresponsible. Even though only a percent of the visitors used the boards, isn't that still hundreds of thousands of people? Aren't they a special demographic? How do they know its nobody they want to support?

</comment><comment><USER66> Sigh. I actually had hope that IMDb would eventually fix its social functionality. That's obviously never going to happen.

There is (was?) a way to add friends on IMDb, but I found it ridiculously hard to find, and even now I can't see their movie ratings or watchlists. The message boards were stuck in the 90s, but at least they got the job done.

Maybe I should write a script to migrate all my ratings to Letterboxd...

<comment><USER6> check out TMDb, it has watchlists, ratings, API for apps and also discussions launched yesterday plus it's by no means some newcomer, they are around since 2008 as alternative to IMDb

<comment><USER66> Thanks! Will do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> This is the worst news I've read. IMDB boards are where I always go to learn about a movie/tv show, there is decades worth of interesting threads and contributions from people who'd never use a 'social network', even with their stupid policy of deleting threads.

Its an insult the way they're going about this. Pretending that the majority of their users would prefer to use the cancer that is FB/Twitter, which even if you wanted to, is in no way even close to being a substitute to having a board for every single movie/tv/actor/cast ever.

The cost to run these boards is less than a rounding error to Amazon, they waste more money on their many projects that never go anywhere.

The real reason is that the people who actually use the boards are dedicated, you can't sell these people's profiles and 'monetize' them, you can't exploit them, and you can't sell them other junk.

I don't even care about moderation - any big forum will have trolls, let people self moderate.

<comment><USER6> fully agree with you, importance of trolls is overstated

if you look for alternative check TMDb which just launched forum discussions for reach title so don't expect decades of collective wisdom available but at least it's somewhere to move on

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I'm one of the original developers and the primary author of the IMDb boards system, started way back in 2001. I wrote up my thoughts here - [https://www.beatworm.co.uk/blog/internet/imdb-boards-no- more](https://www.beatworm.co.uk/blog/internet/imdb-boards-no-more)

</comment><comment><USER69> Unfortunate, but not too surprising.

I recall occasionally finding some interesting trivia on movies or actors/actresses that I would not have searched out on my own. Some very interesting stories on meeting a star in real life, or having grown up with them when they were a child provided a bit of depth that more cut and dry places like Wikipedia don't include, and places like the tabloids wouldn't find interesting enough to print.

Unfortunately these interesting comments are also hidden in the midst of users asking "who else think X actor looks like Y actor?" and the plethora of happy birthday threads.

I do wonder how many actors actually visit their IMDB comments section.

As far as there only being one post per comment, that can easily be changed by clicking on the "flat" view instead of the "thread" view. I agree that it may not be the best default, but it's at least available.

<comment><USER6> i almost never visited general boards or actor boards, they could shut down those and i would not mind, but shutting down boards for specific movies and TV shows where people just discuss those it's just shameful

heck i would even pay for those boards some small fee to keep trolls away (though they ratio was not any sure than other websites, do this is made up reason, you could just ignore them and not feed them), since there is no other alternative

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Interesting comment on reddit (by Manhattan_Writer):

"This is no surprise whatsoever. I've worked at IMDb (the worst and most discouraging experience of my professional life ) and believe me, the company is a soulless, empty corporate shell that has one goal: to sell advertising. It's not about movies, TV, or being 'guardians of data' \- everything is about making money. The entire site is setup to sell advertising, and movie data is simply a means to achieve that. End of story.

The reason IMDb is getting rid of the message boards is simple: they can't be monetised. If IMDb could make money out of the boards, they'd be staying, but there's no cash in it for them, so they're getting axed. The sell-outs who run IMDb will have looked at the 'metrics' (a risible corporate buzzword the Data Team loves so much) and decided that traffic is not high enough for them to make any real money.

It really is that simple. I've experienced first-hand the obsession with metrics, and making money (at the expense of customer satisfaction), and it really is pathetic to behold. No decision is made at IMDb without greed being factored into the equation, and believe me, they will also shut down certain data sections at some point if they get in the way of making money. Forget the fact that the site has compiled 20+ years worth of important data - if one of the sections can no longer be monetised effectively (Literature, for example), they'll just get rid of it, and dump the hard work of thousands of contributors without batting an eye.

In financial terms, keeping the message boards live costs IMDb basically nothing, bar the human cost of maintenance, which - when considered in the context of the site's huge annual profit margin - is less than miniscule. Still, community cannot get in the way of making money, and trying to increase the site's earning by 5-10% every.single.year.

There's no point complaining about it, making suggestions, or suggesting alternate, viable solutions - the hacks at IMDb don't give a toss. There's no money in it for them, so they're not interested. They'll fob you off with the usual hollow platitudes, but make no mistake, the IMDb that people love died years ago. Now, the site is just a shiny, corporate plaything, pimped out by Amazon for the purposes of making money, with greed - not customer focus - being its primary driving force.

One final note: it probably burns IMDb that the majority (over one third) of their users come from China, the audience for which is far less valuable to advertisers than, say, the USA and the UK. Only about 5% of IMDb's users come from the UK, which is ironic considering the site originated in England. But, I digress - IMDb stopped having relevance years ago; Letterboxd is far superior."

[https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/5ruzwc/imdb_message...](https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/5ruzwc/imdb_message_boards_shutting_down_effective/ddawdo7/)

<comment><USER71> But without the message boards, I (and many others) have no reason to visit the site. I expect this will have an indirect effect on page views and advertising sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> It's a shame to see the boards go, but I can understand their reasoning.

Letterboxd and the others are handy for tracking movies, but I found that using Google Sheets with the OMDB API is much better. I can pull the information that I want and easily input titles from lists on Letterboxd and other sites. Add 'Cloud Ignite' instead of pulling from the XML though. Going straight to the XML isn't reliable.

For those looking for good conversations, /r/flicks is the best bet. /r/truefilm is fantastic, but is geared toward long-form discussion.

Its unfortunate for the community. The IMDB boards have been handy over the years. I'm surprised they didn't move to something like Disqus.

<comment><USER6> reddit is too messy, you don't have subreddit for every single movie ever released plus thanks to voting system you will see only popular opinions, controversial but valid opinions will be hidden

i would recommend checking TMDb which launched discussions for each listed title just yesterday, so don't expect there will be much content, but at least each movie or TV show had its own page and own forum, much more neat than reddit

<comment><USER72> TMDB is great. It's awesome that they have discussions now.

I agree that reddit isn't ideal. With the size of truefilm and flicks, the threads aren't usually very big.

Thanks for the heads up re: TMDB!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I found these message boards useful in the past. For example when searching for movies based on parts of a movie script, more if these were obscure mpvies. I don't care about closing the message boards but the data should be archived.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like the irony that it started in a message board. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMDb#History_before_website](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMDb#History_before_website)

</comment><comment><USER74> It amazes me that no one has yet been able to build a self moderating message board that uses a combination of crowd sourcing and machine learning to lower the volumes of the microphones of bad actors. (while balancing it against the general concept of freedom of expression)

Hacker News is one of the better ones out there, but I think it comes more from having a smallish community and active moderation from above. Quora does a pretty good job of suppressing the content of trolls and spammers and those who are unable to provide positive content. But all of them could be improved.

<comment><USER75> One big problem is "garbage in, garbage out". How do we ensure the auto- moderators are trained well? Especially given the effort and cleverness certain destructive individuals are willing to expend?

The community sets the tone and norms, but it is a dynamic, evolving thing, and I think it would be incredibly difficult to robustly formalize in a system that doesn't possess human level intelligence.

Additionally, almost all online communities see a decrease in signal-to-noise ratio as they grow. I think this is one reason reddit has been so successful with their sub-reddit concept, so that groups can splinter off, reformulate their main principles, and start anew.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Call me cynical but all I can picture is one passionate longtime PM on IMDB losing a protracted political battle inside Amazon. If you're out there, thanks for fighting to keep it alive all this time.

</comment><comment><USER77> Off topic: I've found that IMDB has the best advanced search of any media website I've seen: [http://www.imdb.com/search/title](http://www.imdb.com/search/title)

Amazon, Audible, Goodreads, etc are all crap / offer nothing compared to this. I love it, but it makes me sad that other systems don't support such well featured sorting. I wonder if it's because other ones are using document stores instead of relational or something that makes it architecturally difficult.

</comment><comment><USER78> I constantly check for meaning or interpretation of films there, so sad.

</comment><comment><USER79> This is exactly why we never had any forum/prv-msg/comments on our project at TVnfo.com :-) With previous projects, we learned that using those... especially open to public and not require any login to view posts is a very bad idea. Because people tend to post spam/scam and advertise there own products, and not provide any useful information about the actual content on website. In recent years, we've seen a lot of this abuse happening on iMDb as well.

</comment><comment><USER80> If you still want to comment on movies on IMBD but don't want to direct your comments to Facebook or some other website sign up on "The New Internet" (areyoureal.com) you can comment ON TOP of ANY page of the internet including movie pages located on IMDB.

</comment><comment><USER81> I completely disagree with this... when I get on nostalgia kicks I often find useful bits of information about the current lives actors and actresses from my childhood who haven't had much work recently in the imbd comments.

</comment><comment><USER82> Well, we anyway have [http://movies.stackexchange.com/](http://movies.stackexchange.com/). Would have been nice if they had moved to some other platform.

</comment><comment><USER83> Weird move. Why not make the boards read-only (or at least, delete-only) ?

</comment><comment><USER84> It's good for companies to stick to what they're good at. If social isn't a core part of your offerings, don't half ass it and let the poo flinging monkeys take over.

</comment><comment><USER85> I used to enjoy their message boards years ago but then it seemed like every single one was filled with trolls claiming the movie/show was terrible.

</comment><comment><USER86> Couldn't they replace it with something like Disqus? It's a great way to have social comments without the fuss of maintaining the whole system.

</comment><comment><USER87> Just picked a movie at random (Rogue One) and the top featured message board posts are:

      Krennic or Hux?

      I want a Chirrut Imwe & Baze Prequel

      What other genres could be transplanted to the Star Wars Universe?

      Just saw the film tonight - It was OK.

To me, that's a pretty random collection of fringe topics or opinions. Are these really the top things up for discussion about the movie? How about an AMA with the moviemakers? Seems like a lot of potential here not being used.

<comment><USER88> Probably an interested and intelligent community never developed because the commenting and threading tools are so poor. Any discussion of a movie on reddit is 1000x better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> I didn't know they had a message board.

<comment><USER90> Forums were the social add-on of the mid/late-90s that generally produced orders of magnitude higher traffic to a site higher than its core content. Especially if topics were contentious and people insisted on always being "right."

Pair it up with CPV ads in the early days, and folks had a guaranteed income source with little work, and even less if administration of comments were lax.

<comment><USER30> IMDB introduced message boards in 2001, and it was pretty mature by then.

[http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/3/14501650/imdb-message- boards...](http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/3/14501650/imdb-message-boards- shutting-down)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> Calling back to times of yore (both Internet and real world, I guess): "Don't be a sharecropper."

</comment><comment><USER92> Congratulations IMDb. Where can I go to talk about hollyoaks then?

</comment><comment><USER93> Can someone scrape all the boards material and make it available?

</comment><comment><USER94> Seems foolish to not at least replace them with Disqus.

</comment><comment><USER95> Pressured by the movie industry?

</comment><comment><USER92> Nice choice IMDb nice choice IMDb... is all I have to say....

Where else can I talk about hollyoaks with non trolling people.

</comment><comment><USER96> This is great news. Quality of conversation is abysmal on those boards.

</comment><comment><USER97> I didn't even know IMDB had a message board.

</comment><comment><USER98> I can't understand, is storing pure text too expensive for IMDB which is owned by Amazon which runs half the servers of the planet? Why don't they keep the threads while disabling new discussions?

<comment><USER99> There is a comment on Reddit saying that the ArchiveTeam is working on archiving them:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/5s0iiv/slug/ddbugy5](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/5s0iiv/slug/ddbugy5)

<comment><USER100> Thanks for the link. Following the link it appears that the db can is available for download from these two ftp sites :

ftp.fu-berlin.de (Germany) ftp.funet.fi (Finland)

PS: I have not verified them yet.

<comment><USER101> Unfortunately, that's just the DB itself, it doesn't include the boards at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> IMDb seems to be in low maintenance mode for years. I don't understand why Amazon doesn't invest more in it's valuable sister company.

Every slight renovation of the old IMDb website design makes it worse. They should just modify they CSS if they don't understand their job.

IMDb is the Wikipedia of movies, started as community mailing list (or usenet?) and became one of the first websites.

The forum softwares never got improved, it worked the same for 15+ years.

So sad, as really a lot of insightful comments can be found related to movies. Yes, there are the usual troll threads "Person X looks like Person Y", etc but those could be shadow banned really easily. Even if the comments ate archived by Archive.org/etc there will be no method to ask questions or use the forum in future - and all upcoming movies will have no comments. Very sad.

<comment><USER6> actually TMDb is closer to Wikipedia, it can be literally edited by users plus they launched just yesterday discussions, feel free to replace it with closed sourced IMDb not honoring its long-term users

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Makes sense. I don't see what the big deal is, surprised to see this at the top of the front page? I had to double check I wasn't looking at /new

<comment><USER103> What information are we going to lose when it's deleted? Will IMDB consider handing the data to the Internet Archive?

<comment><USER104> I'd argue we won't lose anything. IMDB message boards aren't exactly a trustworthy source of information.

<comment><USER105> Neither is HN for that matter, would you be as indifferent if HN decided to delete all comments?

<comment><USER104> I wouldn't be indifferent, but also I wouldn't defend keeping them in terms of having value outside of my sentimental affection for what I've written that's been up-voted.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


17x17 followup (still unsolved, still worth $289) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2009/12/17x17-comments-on-your-comments.html

<comment><USER2> What is it that he wants?</comment>


Zig Programming Language Blurs the Line Between Compile-Time and Run-Time - <AUTHOR> http://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-programming-language-blurs-line-compile-time-run-time.html <comment><USER2> I'm the last person to talk about type theory, but on the max function example:

 _fn max(comptime T: type, a: T, b: T) - > T { if (a > b) a else b } fn letsTryToPassARuntimeType(condition: bool) { const result = max( if (condition) f32 else u64, 1234, 5678); } Then we get this result from the compiler:

./test.zig:6:9: error: unable to evaluate constant expression if (condition) f32 else u64, ^_

Couldn't the compiler infer some kind of union type. You don't know the type at runtime, but f32 or u64 is a legit comparision type.

</comment><comment><USER2> I like what I'm seeing, but a suggesting regarding shortened keywords. Just go ahead and change compTime to compileTime. I don't see 3 extra characters saving much and makes it less readable. Most modern editors will autocomplete anyway.</comment>


Ask HN: Home automation + data science tool? - <AUTHOR> I plan on working on an open-source project that seamlessly integrates home automation with the Scientific Python tools. The goal is to enable actual smart home apps, beyond basic if-this-then-that rules.
I would appreciate any thoughts as to whether this is interesting to people. Thanks for any feedback!
http://www.kasa.co/ <comment><USER2> Looks interesting. How are you planning to integrate scipy tools? Is the idea to collect data for predictive services that can then control physical devices?

I'm interested enough to try it out, but I'm not sure exactly how to get started. How do I install it on my raspi? I didn't see a README in the github repo and it wasn't immediately obvious to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, johnymontana!

The idea is to have the SciPy tools available in the IPython environment. So from that environment, you can get readings from sensors, and then directly use this as an input to one of the many algorithms available in scikit-learn or scipy.

It's still at an early stage, and the RPi image is not fully ready. I believe it will be in a few weeks. If you can sign up to our mailing list though, I'd love to keep you in the loop. It's on the bottom of the page.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [http://ni-c.github.io/heimcontrol.js/](http://ni-c.github.io/heimcontrol.js/) \-- Same concept but with nodejs + Arduino

</comment><comment><USER4> Clickable - [http://www.kasa.co/](http://www.kasa.co/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Any thoughts on the concept itself?</comment></comment>


Raiblocks is rebranding to Nano - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nanocurrency/nano-rebrand-announcement-9101528a7b76 <comment><USER2> I think that the rebrand better expresses the product mission.

</comment><comment><USER3> This good news hopefully cancels out the bitgrail bad news</comment>


Librem 5 Hardware Update - <AUTHOR> https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-hardware-update-2/ <comment><USER2> Has any technical comparison been made of the Librem 5 and the Pine64 hardware or development kit performance? I know that Pine64 will also release a tablet- only version of their phone, but have not seen whether this is planned for the Librem 5.</comment>


I'm not convinced that this wasn't the second biggest mistake of my life - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/gallery/WCV3Gu7#Bzdk2ik <comment><USER2> Given the post's lack of detail relating to the experience of creating the game itself, I fear OP is treating his craft as a means to an end; instead of loving his craft for what it is. I fell into a similar trap when, after leaving my job to pursue my "passion," I became my own slavemaster, treating myself as resource for production, and eventually learned to hate my once cherished activities. I hope OP's game succeeds; regardless, I would not recommend, to anyone, to pursue a personal hobby, dwelling, or passion as a means to reaching some external reward.

<comment><USER3> I coach people in these circumstances. In most cases they simply lack a model for what constitutes a hobby-type skill vs. what constitutes a full-time+-type skill. They don't know how to tell the difference without diving in and trying it. And I sympathize, having done that myself.

IMO a really basic helpful model is: 1) thing I could do in my sleep and still amaze people with OR make money with == means of making a living and 2) thing that excites me and yet always seems just out of reach == hobby.

However the devil is in the details and you cannot by easily diminish the excitement of #2 (above) because you risk becoming the enemy just by suggesting that it not be prized above all other work. So there are other models which must be skillfully employed to help tease out this comprehension. It's kind of a minefield, actually.

<comment><USER4> Regarding 1) thing I could do in my sleep and still amaze people.

It is a bit dangerous to be unconsciously good (ie in my sleep) at something and think that you can make money with it.

Let's take something like chess. Unless you are a TOP 10 player, you are not going to be making a good living from chess unless you go into secondary sources of income: teaching,writing, coaching. Source: as a master I know many poor grandmasters.

So there has to be a market demand for the skill that you have deliberately practiced to be unconsciously good at.

Like that guy who can skip a stone 88 times. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0_hEvNOqGM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0_hEvNOqGM)

He certainly enjoys it and people are amazed by it. However there is a very limited demand for experienced stone skippers.

<comment><USER3> Yes, this is a good example of what I consider the fundamental work to be done in the area of #1. A lot of career books and tools aim at this kind of approach as well. I also use a Role/Group/Reward model that makes it clear that even if you have an offer on the table where you'd be playing chess for great money, you still have inquiries to make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Anyone interested in an infuriating tale of mismanagement, fraud, > incompetence, duplicity, backstabbing, turf wars, and tyranny of petty > authority, I encourage to send a Freedom of Information Act request to NSA. > Ask for the post "Beyond Mere Malice" from the Parting Thoughts blog, > November 2016.

Anyone going to do this?

<comment><USER6> Do you want to get your name on a list?

Because that is how you get your name on a list.

<comment><USER7> I think you mean "another list"...

Surely one more list wont make any difference, right?

:sigh:

<comment><USER8> Naw, we're all on a list. Where we rank is what matters.

<comment><USER9> I think this.

I had a friend who formerly worked for military intelligence in the UK who asked once (to a group) if we thought we were on the GCHQ database. I said yes, I would likely be in there and when he asked why I gave my reason, which is that I once did something that relatively, very few people have done and thus I have marked myself as ahead of the crowd in some way since it is probable that the government became aware of that. My friend did not confirm or deny but acknowledged my contribution. I presume he would be forbidden from revealing operational details like this but these days I think that yes I am in the database because we are all in it.

Its going to be a relational database and there is no single 'rank' as such but certainly accomplishments and connections are noted. If you speak <language> and they hear about that, they will note that. They might need a <language> speaker at short notice one day and you just happen to be there. They might need a person with a particular type and colour of car. They might need a pilot. All of these people are already available within the military but they might want somebody else. It is their job to keep tabs and I think they probably do it well.

<comment><USER10> This is a compelling story that may be true for the UK, but there is no such list in the US.

Sadly, recruiting for the intelligence community is probably around the same efficiency of your local state government. Recruiters go to college career fairs and review applications from the website. Most candidates are unqualified, crackpots, or both. A couple schools have professors that encourage students to work for agencies, so alumni from these schools are overrepresented in the IC.

Occasionally, an outstanding person is identified and recruited, but this is rare. It is almost certainly driven by a person on the inside giving a referral. The recruiters have no bandwidth to be spending time pursuing candidates in any kind of targeted fashion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish OP well, but as a person from South Asia, it's very hard to not have a bitter taste left in my mouth when you mention you used to be an CIA officer in South Asia and then moved on to work for the NSA, no less.

<comment> Ar-Curunir I understand that the CIA have been villains in many different countries, but I didn't know about their involvement in South Asia. Could you elaborate a bit?

<comment><USER12> Here is a (very) incomplete list of recent CIA activities in South Asia. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Pakistan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Pakistan)

Going back to the 80's, you have Operation Cyclone, which was the CIA operation to arm and finance the mujahadeen against the USSR, which led to the creation of the Taliban, 10 years of brutal theocratic rule and ethnic cleansing in Afghanistan, and ultimately to the September 11th attacks on the United States, and to the (still ongoing) NATO occupation. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone)

I don't know much about India, but it looks like the CIA may be implicated in the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and bombed a plane in the 50's in an attempt to kill Zhou Enlai. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_India)

I think GP is pretty justified in saying that the presence of a CIA/NSA operative in South Asia would leave a bad taste in his mouth.

<comment><USER13> > which was the CIA operation to arm and finance the mujahadeen against the > USSR, which led to the creation of the Taliban

That is actually not what happened. The mujahadeen are not precursors of the Taliban. Matter of fact, the mujahadeen and Taliban fought each other. Many members of the mujahadeen left to join the Taliban but they are not the same. The Taliban was started by students.

<comment><USER14> Mujahideen just the plural form of mujahid: a person who engages in Jihad. It is not a specific group. The term applies equally well to the Taliban as the many other groups that operated in Afghanistan.

<comment><USER15> Not in this case. The mujahideen were a specific group of warlords who fought against the taliban (which just means 'students' by the way).

<comment><USER14> No, they really were not a specific group. There was eventually an organization that organised some of the biggest groups of mujahideen in Afghanistan into a couple of alliances (the Peshawar 7 and the Teheran Eight being two of them), but there were many other groups as well.

The Taliban did not in any case organize until after infighting broke out again among those groups, and the Taliban's growth came in large part exactly because these groups were far more disunited at the point the Taliban was rising than during the war against the Soviets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can't speak much to the military things in this post, but I will just add that as someone who also tried to make money from video games for quite some time in the recent past, it's _such_ a hard way to make money.

Web development has not been nearly as "fun", but it's been so much more lucrative. If you want to make video games as a business, I'd say make your money first with "boring" work and then making a video game can be fun since you don't have to have the financial pressure overhanging it. You hear the indie darling success stories like Undertale, Stardew Valley, etc. But I imagine that the common case is: "Spend lots of time, then nothing happens."

<comment><USER17> Currently saving up a retirement nest egg to work on video games full time. Your advice matches with my own research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not to make light of a serious situation but if this is some kind of viral marketing I'm actually impressed. It's captivating.

<comment><USER19> It's a commentary on our age that your first thought is that it might be a lie.

<comment><USER20> Was there an age when people blindly trusted everything they read? Healthy skepticism can be a very good thing.

<comment><USER21> It's taking things to an extreme – like automatically mistrusting the source because it seems to attempt playing the reader's heartstrings – that's a defining characteristic of the Internet era.

Not everyone makes up their stories, and not nearly everyone is lying – but there are people who will abuse the natural trust people exhibit, and take the profits into their pockets, as opposed to helping their fictional cause.

It's so prominent because there's a whole lot of people who do that. Similar to the "vocal minority" phenomenon, people start assuming that everyone in the same group is <something>, regardless of how valid the assumption is, because of the exposure towards a certain kind of the group's members.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _Anyone interested in an infuriating tale of mismanagement, fraud, incompetence, duplicity, backstabbing, turf wars, and tyranny of petty authority, I encourage to send a Freedom of Information Act request to NSA._

Haven't we gotten the distinct impression that the unsupervised services are rife with such experiences, even more than other federal government bureaucracies? When it's illegal to go the press, very few people do so.

<comment><USER13> It sounds like big organization problems and office politics that you can find anywhere. Academia is a good example. Nothing unique here or surprising.

<comment><USER22> Wow that's dystopian. I've worked in large organizations enough to know that they aren't my cup of tea, but I've never seen things sink to these levels. Why would humans voluntarily join such organizations? (Yeah, I know, to make a living... but TFA seems to indicate that there are other options.)

When work situations get really intolerable, the civil courts are always an option. Except, for the unsupervised services they aren't. I'm sure that makes a difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Funny enough I had a related talk with a friend just yesterday. Say that there is a hard contest with cruel winning odds which -if you succeed- you get a permanent position in a public sector body (say ECB) with very good salary for life. Also say that the situation in private sector (job market) goes to hell and shows no signs of reverting any time soon. Then say you succeed and get that lifer position where no one can fire you from but yourself. Then imagine you get a boss or an environment that it is so damned toxic that is unbearable. But still no one can fire you. No one but you. But now the dilemma is huge. Do you quit a permanent position and jump back to hell (even less well equipped since the time you left it) or do you just hang on in there hoping for a wind change? The stakes are much higher than if you were in yet another private job where you'd be just refreshing your CV and interviewing.

Dunno - I guess there are cases where you need to be careful what you wish for.

<comment><USER24> This sounds like the tale of many Brazilian civil servants. Civil servants in Brazil are either indicated by someone ("comissionados"), which means your job is tied to the current administration, or you've passed in a selection and have your job stability for life ("concursado"). These selections usually have tens or hundreds of thousands of people competing for a handful of vacancies, so people spend years studying and doing many of these (they're called "concurseiros"). Once you're in, you're set for life.

Adding to this, the public sector pays much more than the private sector (often 50% ~ 100% more). Have job stability, generous vacations and other benefits. Depending on where you are (federal, state or municipal government levels), you also have a special retirement plan that gives you 100% of your salary when you retire (the private policies are capped at around 4.5 minimum wages, for comparison a good dev in the bigger cities can get about 10~15 minimum wages).

And so we have many "lifers" in the public sector, and this kind of job is the dream for many people (which is terrible IMHO).

<comment><USER23> To a large extent a job is what you make of it. I understand why being a lifer might seem terrible to one and a dream to another. There are no constants here - it's all relevant.

Someone gets a permanent position and is dragging his feet and dying out of boredom. Someone else sees that as an extra degree of freedom (not having to worry about his job security) and he is branching out say to explore/contribute to a tech stack that is not popular with employers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I hope it's a blockbuster. But this line bothered me:

"This ends here. Anything you write from here on out, we have to approve. If you write a tell-all book without our permission, you go to prison. Any questions?"

I hope that does not apply to software.

<comment><USER26> I expect there to be a follow-up that OP died in a tragic "accident".

<comment><USER21> He did say "CIA", not "FSB".

<comment><USER27> you are right, a suicide then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Was hoping for this: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybius_(urban_legend)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybius_\(urban_legend\))

<comment><USER29> Oh, that was in my local arcade when I was a kid. They closed it down a couple of years ago sadly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "I can take some fictional people, make everyone betray them for all their own petty and cowardly reasons, and our protagonists will just have to deal with it."

Birth of a genre.

<comment><USER31> Too late. George R. R. Martin beat him to it :-)

<comment><USER32> Also reminiscent of _Consider Phlebas_ by Iain M Banks.

<comment><USER33> Or an average RPG campaign based in the WoD Vampire setting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Suffering makes for great art. And this looks like some truly creative shit. Sorry, and thanks.

<comment><USER35> I'm going to go off on a tangent here, and I want to make it clear that I am _not_ railing against karmakaze or suggesting they implied things they didn't say. It is just that in a more general sense I wish this notion of "suffering for art" would die, and this is just me venting my frustration with this meme (in the original sense of the word). Because I think it applies to the tech industry just as much.

Hannah Gadsby's put it into words better than I can in "Nanette", but sadly I can't link to a 1-hour Netflix special so my own angry take on this will have to do.

Yes, _some_ art, specifically art _about_ suffering, benefits from people who experienced suffering. Otto Dix is brilliant _because_ he shows us the horrors of war he experienced[0][1]. And there is such a thing as posttraumatic growth[2], so sure, overcoming "suffering" can have benefits in general. Emphasis _overcoming_ , though!

Other than that it's romantic nonsense that has been debunked by psychology time and time again. And it's _dangerous_ nonsense too, because it leads to movies like Whiplash.

Don't get me wrong: it's a brilliant film, but because it's so dazzling I don't think people criticize the issues it has enough. Think about it: two of the most privileged white dudes in the world complain that Jazz is dying, and our main antagonist spends the entire film bullying, tormenting, sometimes flat-out gaslighting his students because he somehow believes that traumatizing them will make them as good as some of the worlds greatest musicians. Of course, he is being completely ignorant of the context that the latter lived in, of their personal histories. Suffering in itself does not inspire greatness, dammit.

Perhaps Whiplash's underlying thesis is that this is _not_ true, nor justifyiable, but if so it's just like anti-war movies that end up glorifying war.

Because it ends with giving Terence Fletcher a moment to tell "his side" of the story. He shows no regret for bullying one of his students into suicide, "because a _real_ Charlie Parker would have been able to take [my abuse]."

Holy freaking self-serving cherry picking survivor bias, Batman! First of all, _we don 't know_ if Charlie Parker would have been any less brilliant if he had had proper therapy for his inner demons. Perhaps he would have been _more brilliant_ , ever considered that? Young John Coltrane suffered from heroine and alcohol addictions, but he wrote "A Love Supreme" _after_ he had a religious experience and overcame those addictions. Not to mention the fact that we are ignoring countless of brilliant artist who are not suffering, which you don't hear about _because_ it's not a juicy story.

So at the end of the movie the main characters are just as horrible, misguided and unaware of their own institutional whiteness and privileges as before, and haven't really learned anything. Then they give a dazzling performance that seems to suggest to us that yes, all of this was justified to give us this. It's ignorant, insulting and wrong.

Believing that suffering for art is necessary is a misguided, romantic and outdated and dangerous view of genius and I can't wait for it to die. No matter what field we are talking about.

[0] [https://www.ottodix.org](https://www.ottodix.org)

[1] The appreciation of "ugly" art is actually a very interesting topic, I recommend _Talk about a Painting: A Cognitive Developmental Analysis_ as a nice starting point.

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posttraumatic_growth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posttraumatic_growth)

<comment><USER36> I don't disagree with you entirely but I think "suffering for art" is really just a corollary (admittedly, often taken to its absurd extreme) of the idea that art can't be created in a complacent vacuum.

<comment><USER35> I wholeheartedly support the claim that art cannot exist in a vacuum - I've ranted plenty of times about the whole notion of "autonomous" art (an invention of modernism), being problematic for that very reason.

But I disagree with idea that suffering for art is just "a corollary" to that. That would ignore that The Suffering Artist is an age old trope with a long history of examples of (IMO misplaced) hero-worshiping, which has nothing to do with this "complacent vacuum".

Yes, art (or science or tech or social change or whatever) is always created within a certain context, and this context may have obstacles that need to be overcome to create said art. Sometimes those obstacles involve suffering, and not everyone is willing to pay that price.

There is a romantic notion of believing in something greater than yourself and suffering for it, and sometimes that is true: Snowden was _willing to suffer_ to get the truth out, and without it we wouldn't have known what we know now.

But knowing the context and the price of what you want to do, and paying it willingly does not imply that great art (any kind of "greatness") requires suffering, or worse: that an artwork becomes better if the artist suffered for it. That's an utterly banal reversal of causality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm not convinced that this wasn't a sob story to advertise his game. Well done, because it seems to work.

<comment><USER38> He says it is at the beginning. See comments above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> "It's going to be a lot longer than that before I'm finished. But it's time for me to start moving along, and I'm releasing the game as an Early Access title on Steam next month. I don't know how well the game is going to sell. I've started looking for my next grownup job after this"

Am I understanding this correctly? He's dumping the game on 'Early Access' but isn't going to finish it? Hardly early access and more duping people, if I'm not mistaken?

<comment><USER40> Maybe he plans to continue developing the game as a hobby/side thing though and wants to see how much community interest there is for it. With some luck, it could become an ongoing thing like a webcomic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I wish the author had posted this after it was available on Steam. I've read his story and I'd like to support him but I can't. By the time it's possible to buy this game I would likely have forgotten about it.

Still, kudos to him for persevering and getting his project to completion.

<comment><USER42> You can follow it on Steam and they will tell you when it is available, no?

A real question. I don't use Steam.

<comment><USER43> Yes, you can add it to a wishlist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Wasn't it some external contractor doing sentiment analysis for media publications for ISAF? The contract was cancelled by DoD after publication of an article in Stars and Stripes about censorship and denying access to battlefield for some journalists based on that reports. What was the role of the author in that?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I took the title the author used on a thread, since I think the title of the album is not explicit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the mods updated the title to the one of the album.

The previous title was "I started making a video game because the CIA was ruining my life"

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> if it made you happier, it was a good choice. if it makes you sadder, it was a good lesson, and that should make you happy :D

</comment><comment><USER46> Excellent marketing, at least!

</comment><comment><USER47> This petty, begging article might be the third biggest mistake

<comment><USER48> Some may not like the article, but now he is standing out of the thousands game developers. He got the attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> what are the expertise needed to create such a game? it always looks magical to me how those games are created?</comment>


Why location based advertising won't work in its current form - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2009/12/why-location-based-couponingadvertising-wont-work-in-its-current-form/

<comment><USER2> One solution is auto-responder SMS coupons. Walk by Starbucks, see instructions in the window to text them for an instant coupon, do it!

I'm building a platform for this right now. Obviously it's not rocket science, and something like the blog mentions would be much better.</comment>


Owners of solar company that caused loss for Buffett are guilty of Ponzi scheme - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/news/owners-solar-company-caused-loss-233034595.html <comment><USER2> There were some good in depth articles out there on this topic.

What I didn't get was how many people there would see statements about what they were doing and wondering "we aren't producing that much...." when it came to the actual products.</comment>


Hacked kinect Brings Futuristic User Interface - <AUTHOR> http://digitizor.com/2010/11/15/hacked-kinect-brings-futuristic-user-interface/ <comment><USER2> As far as Microsoft is concerned, 3rd party drivers and applications are the best thing to happen to the Kinect. Remember the original iPhone pre-app store? Jailbroken apps paved the way for what is now the billion dollar iOS app industry.

I don't think Microsoft is planning on running their own app store (at least not with the Kinect), but like with the iPhone, users "voiding the warranty" so to speak may usher in a wave of innovation in terms of accessibility and user interaction beyond the Xbox. Microsoft should know that watching what people do with the Kinect outside of the (artificial) design limits is one of the best (and least expensive) form of product-market research.

Here's an idea for use that Microsoft could create and profit from: Kinect as a remote control for a media center PC. No more losing the remote or replacing batteries. That one's free, Microsoft.

<comment><USER3> Best thing? Microsoft isn't making money on selling Kinect (or Xbox, for that matter), they are making money on selling games for Xbox.

How can making Kinect work without Xbox (and even without Microsoft's OS) can be a good thing for them? If this would let to increase in Xbox sales then sure, but the thing works without Xbox now, so I don't see why anyone at Microsoft should be happy about it.

<comment><USER4> Source?

Last I heard, someone estimated the cost of the parts in a Kinect at $56, which is quite a bit less than the $150 they sell for. Even with all the related costs, they're making pretty good money off every Kinect they sell.

<comment><USER3> Simple Google search will reveal various sources quoting costs at either $56 (parts only) or $150 (manufacturing). Even if it would be indeed "only" $56 for parts, then you need to account for R&D, assembly, testing, packaging, worldwide delivery, marketing, not-so-small retailer's margin, import duty and VAT (where applies) and I'm pretty sure it would sum-up nicely to sub-$150.

Also, this is something that I consider "common knowledge" and I cannot point you to any sources, but for years console makers (Microsoft, Sony & Nintendo) has been selling consoles for (or even below) the manufacturing costs to allow for wider adoption.

From what I recall, Microsoft in the beginning was breaking-even after they sold at least 3 games for given console. That's why piracy is so big problem in the console world, not only is the console maker _not making money_ , but they are actually _losing money_ on pirates that only buy console.

<comment><USER5> The Wii is not a loss leader. Only the original xbox, ps3, and 360 are loss leaders. It's entirely possible for the kinect to be break even, or just barely loss, in which case I think Microsoft is willing to take the hit for more mindshare/market share.

Maybe their PHB and marketing drones won't get that, but I think their real managers and marketing people (they have to have exist for the xbox division to get where they are) are going to see how valuable this is. I mean, MS threw an entire hardware generation as a loss-leader, I think they'll happily take a break-even to make Sony look silly.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I completely agree with you... However, my point was that people who only buy Kinect (at break-even or some loss) without any intention of buying games or even console, cannot be the best thing (or even a good thing) for Microsoft, like _dkokelley_ said.

<comment><USER2> Reread my original post. I said that the Kinect could bring innovation in other areas (beyond the Xbox), which in turn could sell more media center PCs, for example. I imagine that without the drivers, the Kinect would have remained a game controller novelty at best. I didn't intend to imply that the drivers would sell more Kinects or Xboxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Minority Report" interfaces look really cool when demoed, but I have yet to see a solution to gorilla arm syndrome. No matter how good the technology gets, nobody is going to want to wave their arms around in front of them for anything even close to "an extended amount of time".

This technology has a lot of potential, but this particular application is a dead end.

<comment><USER7> Another commenter called out a use I hadn't thought of: operating media center PCs without a mouse or remote. Since you only need brief interactions, the fatigue wouldn't a big deal.

<comment><USER8> Personally, I'd rather tell my media centre PC to change channel with a voice command than wave my hand at it. Seems more natural to me. I'm sure flicking through channels would be easy enough with some kind of motion commands, but navigating to specific channels, how would you do that? I guess you could have a specific gesture for each individual channel, but even then, it would me much easier to just say the name of a chennel. Another idea would be a specific gesture to go to the list of channels, which you could then scroll through and select, but this is still more work then voice commands. I'm not saying this technology sucks, I think it's fantastic, but it doesn't solve every UI problem.

<comment><USER9> Ive read a commenter here in HN remark on how the Voice recognition of the Kinect is something that is seriously being slept on/not paid enough attention too.

<comment><USER4> That's because it's just 4 microphones. You STILL have to do the speech recognition yourself, and that's tough.

The new part of the Kinect is the 3D stuff, so that's what people are playing with.

<comment><USER10> That's odd, the XBox SDK had a speech recognition library build in to it. I presumed that shipped as part of the XBox 360 SDK?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If Microsoft is losing money on every sale, the simplest solution to this is to stop selling it separate from an Xbox (feasible as soon as the original Kinect uptake approaches 100% of active game-purchasing consoles) or build it into a next-generation console.

OTOH, Microsoft could just as well keep selling it. I bet the fraction of purchases that will end up in Linux boxes is tiny when compared to the part that goes to Xboxes and generate game sales.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sorry but that is not a futuristic interface.

That is a current interface in need of a futuristic application.

</comment><comment><USER13> What really pains me is that Microsofts response to all this innovation and geek love is to threaten people working on the drivers to make this possible with jail.

I understand that they want to protect their investment. Especially if the are selling the hardware at a loss (I don't know whether they are), but a bit more open mindedness could be so helpful in getting geeks excited (and maybe selling more consoles in the long run)

Look at the Wiimote. Did nintendo lose anything as the community began doing crazy stuff with it? I know of at least one case where the Wiimotes hacker- friendliness sold a console.

<comment><USER14> Isn't the obvious solution for Microsoft in the case of the Kinect to just up the price so they aren't selling it at a loss (assuming they are)? Hobbyists will still buy them and do innovative things with the device, especially if there appears to be less risk of C&Ds down the line.

<comment><USER15> They may also have had plans to do some of these things themselves and the projects people are publishing could count as prior art, preventing them from patenting various things.

This is pure speculation and I have no information to support it, though. It's kind of sad that they appear to be hostile to the notion of people hacking this nifty device into something even greater.

I don't think they're selling it at a loss, but who knows? Apparently, they've been shoveling profits around to hide weakness in the Windows division, or at least InformationWeek thinks so.

Source: [http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/reviews/showArti...](http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/reviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228200850&itc=ref- true)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: How do payment gateway users collect VAT? - <AUTHOR>

How do SaaS or software providers using payment gateways such as Braintree, TrustCommerce, or Authorize.net collect VAT from EU consumers?
Because they're acting as resellers, Ecommerce vendors like Plimus and Avangate are responsible for collecting VAT for EU consumers who don't have a valid VAT ID for electronically delivered products. Per http://www.avangate.com/articles/software-vat-123.htm : "Private customers (consumers) in EU countries must be charged VAT for electronically supplied services and products, both by EU and non-EU providers."
Collecting VAT yourself would be quite a headache: "...non-EU sellers have to ... pay the specific member state tax authorities (all 27 of them) their respective VAT..." (http://tinyurl.com/pgnvpb). The revenue threshold for being required to collect VAT can be quite low: "Denmark, for example, taxes all traders with an annual turnover of $1,600" (annual revenue of $1,600 from Denmark I assume). (http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxtopics/encyclopedia/VAT.cfm) <comment><USER2> You charge the price+vat, then pay your VAT to your home government. But since it's a "Value-Added" tax you claim back VAT on the goods and services you have purchased.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why would you bother to do this if you are a non-EU provider?

<comment><AUTHOR> Plimus and other non-EU resellers collect VAT for a reason. See for example [http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.366294.2...](http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.366294.21) , [http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/VAT-in- Europe-7-Steps...](http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/VAT-in- Europe-7-Steps-to-Success/) and <http://www.ez-eu.com/eu-vat-why.html>.</comment></comment>