IMDb is pulling up the shutters: if you want to read user reviews in future, you need an account. What's behind the change and what alternatives remain.

TIL about it after reading this post. It seems to have started around 17/April

From the article:

a login barrier for reading does not really stop AI scrapers because bots can be equipped with accounts within a few minutes. Instead, many suspect that Amazon’s main aim is to increase the number of registered users. After all, those who are logged in can be tracked better – and can be provided with more targeted recommendations and advertising.

Are there open source alternatives to it?

    • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
      5·
      9 days ago

      competiion will barely arise because the ai scrape stuff eventually hits a sites profitability. Ai scraping for example is why Rtings went subscription for full review access, as most users dont even bother to click through to the rtings source for recommendations after googling for a product review.

      combination of gemini, AMP links and such has basically destroyed text based reviews

      • tomenzgg@midwest.socialEnglish
        11·
        9 days ago

        Wikipedia doesn’t offer user reviews, however.

        I do read Wikipedia before I bother reading IMDb – even before today –, though.

          • tomenzgg@midwest.socialEnglish
            2·
            3 days ago

            Haha; I had a friend, in college, who saw me use it one time and just paused before going, “Hate that.”

            I saw its use in an older document/manuscript, originally (I want to say that the writer was from ~1800s?), and thought it was a sensible enough means of handling when you’ve got two sentence fragments right next to each other; been using it, ever since.

        • inari@piefed.zipEnglish
          4·
          9 days ago

          I just head to the Reception section and check the Rotten Tomatoes reviews

  • SolarMonkey@slrpnk.netEnglish
    12·
    9 days ago

    I stopped using IMDB ages ago when they started serving their ads through the same domain they host all their other images on, so blocking ads broke the site entirely.

    I left those ads blocked though, and just stopped using IMDB. Looks like I made the right choice.

  • cobysev@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    9 days ago

    Good thing I don’t care about others’ reviews. If they start blocking access to movie information though, I might have to quit using their site.

  • Dasus@lemmy.world
    2·
    8 days ago

    I have an account that’s like 25ish years old. Just logged in with userrname and password, lol. Making a new account though, bet you need to link a bunch of things.

  • shirasho@feddit.onlineEnglish
    1·
    8 days ago

    A couple of media related websites have started doing this recently. There is an influx of web scraping that has been causing performance degradation of the website, so requiring users to log in is a way of maintaining website performance for valid users.

    I totally understand that a lot of people dont want to create accounts or give personal information, and I understand that website degradation is not always the driving factor.