Should we allow movie trailer posts?

americanaquarium
Mon, 06 Aug 2018 17:35:12 +0000

EDIT: Alright, this ended up veering off in the direction that I was hoping it wouldn't. My apologies if I pushed things in the wrong direction from the outset.

I want to make very clear from the outset of this post that I am not calling anyone out for posting this type of content, and I do not want to criticize any individuals for making such posts. This is intended to be a high level discussion of what general types of content are worthwhile here, to see if we can define some of the community specific goals about relevant content. And I know this comes at the risk of being yet another meta post about tildes content (feel free to move this post elsewhere if others think it is better suited, I mainly chose to post here to work on being more community specific about our goals).

This question comes up because a quick glance at the current ~movies page shows a whole bunch of movie trailer posts. The majority of them have zero discussion. Of the ones that do have discussion, most of that is pretty low effort. So part of the question to address is: do movie trailer posts ever generate good discussion in the first place? Looking at reddit, the answer is almost always no, and the posting of movie trailers is often a race among karma farmers with little actual interest in what they are posting. Part of the problem I see there is that it primarily leads towards a discussion of the movie itself rather than the trailer. Since the movie hasn't come out yet when the trailer is posted, that discussion is entirely speculative, and leads to some sticky situations like with the Ghostbusters remake, where more outrage was generated over the female leads casting than any discussion of the film's own merits.

There are, very occasionally, trailers that are in and of themselves interesting pieces of artistic expression; so part of me says that a universal ban on trailers being posted would be overkill. But in those cases it may be beneficial to enforce that the discussion should focus on the presentation of the trailer itself. Though countering my own argument, trailers are fundamentally designed to draw attention towards the movie, so perhaps isolated discussion does not make sense. But that would again point to a desire to simply omit all trailers being posted. Possibly unless it is for a movie that has already been released, in which the trailer could serve as merely a marker to open discussion on the movie itself.

So what does everyone else think? I'm totally okay if everyone says they like seeing the movie trailers on here, but I thought it would be a good time to discuss it.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~movies/4h7/should_we_allow_movie_trailer_posts

Votes: 12

Comments: 24