What are your thoughts on Reddit's r/movies subreddit ?
Personally, I strongly dislike it. Every aspect of every film is way overblown there.
If there's a funny scene in a movie, they LITERALLY die laughing and wake their whole neighbourhood up.
If there's a scene that is in the slightest bit sad, they're going to cry their eyes out for months.
If there's a movie that's decently good, then it's an absolute masterpiece and the best movie of the decade.
And so on... Everything is always really exaggerated.
On top of that, there's always the circlejerk hivemind aspect. Threads are closed after 6 months, so the whole discussion about the film is divided between many threads, but because every thread is small and new, you often get the same fluff comments.
For more popular flims, it is the absolute worst. With half the thread being just funny quotes from the movie with no additional commentary or anything valuable, yet having thousands upon thousands of upvotes. It's kind of sad.
I used to go to IMDb boards, –which, admittedly, had their own issues– but they were still pretty useful for discussion. And shutting people up wasn't as easy as it is on Reddit, so the opinions there were much more varied. However, since they shut them down, Reddit is the closest thing I've found. Moviechat.org is supposed to be a replacement to the IMDb boards, but it's pretty inactive.
So, even though I kind of despise r/movies, I'm sort of forced to use them. But reading it makes me somewhat bitter.
What about you?
I absolutely agree, though I will say that smaller subs can still have good discussion, but they're harder to track down and usually don't stay good for long. Currently, I think my favourite large sub for comments (and keep in mind, it's still very so-so) is r/askreddit. It will often have interesting and thought provoking top level comments. That being said, it is still plagued by generic office reference replies or something along those lines. I still enjoy browsing reddit, personally, but not for discussion, which is where Tildes comes into play.
I enjoyed r/askreddit a lot for my first 1-2 years on Reddit. After that time, though, I can pretty much predict what meme or pun every question and top comment are going to be replied with. I learned a lot through r/askreddit, mind you. But checking the sub out now is like meeting your high school friends 10 years later and finding out they haven't really grown one bit.
I see what you mean, and I will concur that 80% of askreddit is immature garbage. With that being said, however, I think that the other 20% of the time, you may find a gold bar in askreddit, even if 50% of posts are probably copy pasted from yesterday and 80% of comments are a dick joke.
Yeah, once Reddit-isms and Reddit humor start to bother you, even relatively decent places (and I would include /r/movies in that, it's fine for its size) start to fall apart. I don't think there's anything especially wrong with it, Reddit is just a bad place for discussion and it doesn't break from that.
For alternative places to talk about movies, I think a lot of people nowadays are relying on the social features on Letterboxd, though I'm not a fan of the site. /r/Truefilm and /r/Flicks were decent places when I was on Reddit, too. Personally, I'm just waiting for the Cinemos launch (rateyourmusic is changing into Sonemic and introducing sister sites for movies and games) as I enjoy the social experience on RYM much more than the alternatives. RYM has movie support right now, but it's super fucking spotty and the community for it isn't really there yet.
Of course, as @tomf mentioned, our best option is making ~movies here a good home for this sort of thing :)
As a workaround, try finding smaller subreddits about topics you like, they often start with
trueand are more strict about fluff content. For example, compare r/AskReddit and r/TrueAskReddit.Also if you'd like to discuss a movie we can talk about it on Tildes too.
further to this, the entire 'depth hub' has some gems. Check the sidebar at https://old.reddit.com/r/DepthHub/
The /r/Movies equivalent is /r/TrueFilm, though I find they speak less often of new and upcoming movies.
Finding a new home can be tough. /r/movies is fun, but as you said, a total circlejerk. /r/flicks is a decent middle ground, but not as active as it could be, and /r/truefilm is excellent, but can be stuffy.
You might like: http://www.criterionforum.org/forum
All this said, if you want to shoot the breeze about movies, we should get to work on ~movies
I think any sufficiently large movie forum is going to be the same. I like to call them "TV movie" forums because they tend to post mostly on movies that are advertised on TV and older "classic" movies that frequently get aired. Content about independent and foreign movies get posted at a frequency inverse to the forum's popularity.
You can't blame anyone, it's just human nature.