A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
IMDb has been making shitty decisions for a long time. They have always been a business first, community last.
I doubt RT is much better but I use it mostly. It at least has been consistently the same amount of shitty UI since inception. TheMovieDb.org has a decent ratings system too and is getting more use, but again it's privately owned.
I'm not aware of a community run and operated ratings DB that's got any significant uptake.. Would be glad to hear of one if anyone knows.
They want data. Email addresses and usernames they can sell. Everybody's doing it to feed the evil beast known as advertising. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Companies sometimes sell their own first-party data, but not nearly as often as people think. If a company has data that other companies don't have, a lot of the time they'll want to keep it for themselves, since it can give them a competitive advantage over other platforms.
If Amazon knows what movies and TV shows you like, they're going to use that data to improve ad performance on their own platforms - suggested content on Prime Video, product ads on Amazon, etc. They're not going to give it to some other company to use.
The one major exception to that are data brokers. These are companies that only exist to sell data. These are less well known companies. They often use public data and combine it with things like supermarket loyalty data and purchase history.
I'm not sure why other commenters are able to do this without an account, but I also was surprised just now to click on user reviews to see:
Sign in to access user reviews - See opinions from other fans, or write your own review.
It's getting worse and worse with this shit all over the internet. They have fairly successfully already enclosed most of the commons, now they're building up the walls higher and higher. It's all about control and of course tracking. I used to use a frontend libremdb.iket.me to access IMDB, similar to nitter/xcancel to read twitter or invidious to watch youtube. But it looks like IMDB made sure that is completely broken now.
Edit: It's also a way to make people use the app instead of the website. This too is happening all over, reddit is well known for doing everything it can to force people onto the app, and their specific proprietary app. And it's for the same reasons I mentioned above. It's a lot harder to block ads from the app, but viewing the website with uBlock Origin on (and I refuse to browse any of the web without it, personally) you don't have to view a single ad. And again, control. You have a lot more choice and options using a web browser, not to mention somewhat obscure your identity, even though that's also becoming more impossible with browser fingerprinting. But using an app let's them curate exactly what they want you to see, including ads, and also gives them your exact unique identity. I don't know, I won't use the app, but I'm assuming you have to have an account to use the app, so of course people on the app aren't going to get a login wall because they're already logged in.
Fuck corporate enshittification. Fuck IMDB. Fuck Amazon.
With you 
It’s gotten more aggressive, but it hasn’t forced me to create an account yet.
E: hmm, the app doesn’t force me to sign in, but I do see that if I try to use a web browser.
They don't force me to sign in when using browser. Are you from a Western country?
Not sure what your talking about. You can still access IMDB from a browser. You talking about something else?
Yeah I just used it last night.
Meanwhile I go to IMDb and am not forced to create an account.
Can you specifically go to "user reviews" using the website without getting a login wall?