I'm ditching Letterboxd

Over the past few years Letterboxd seems to have very quickly grown into the site for film lovers. I had a little time of thinking I could really get into it. I do like reading film reviews from regular people and I’m actually quite blown away by just how many movies some people watch. I probably manage one or two films a week personally, sometimes none though, other times I’m really into an episodic show or something else takes up my free time.

Does everything really have to be like social media?

The thing about Letterboxd is that to me it feels like gamification and another form of social media. For some people on there it’s a bit of a numbers game. There’s almost a striving to be the most prolific reviewer, a Letterboxd celebrity or influencer. There are lot of reviews that are just simple quippy one liner responses, they can be funny, but also it feels like playing for points. They get rewarded with a little thumbs ups, hearts or stars or whatever just like in other familiar addictive services. We’re all guilty of seeking our little dopamine rewards, but does everything really have to be like social media?

Maybe I’m just bad at ratings and favourites

I’m not totally against the service or anyone who uses it.. and I’m not mad about it. I have found some enjoyment there. It’s much more about where I am personally right now. I’m reducing the number of services I use in general, and the punk in me grows suspicious as things become mainstream. I’ve been having similar feelings about Bluesky recently and deactivated that.. posting feels too much like a competitive sport on there.

I actually find rating things out of 5 stars very difficult, it’s very reductive. I could strongly dislike a film but also think it’s well made for people who are fans of that kind of thing.. it’s more complicated than a star rating. I wouldn’t rate many things 5 star. Those to me I suppose would be near perfect, classic ‘send them to space’ movies. I’m thinking ‘Shawshank Redemption’, ‘Alien’, ‘The Godfather: Part II’ ‘. I would feel a bit of a tight arse because the majority of things, I rate around 3ish. A 3 to me is good!! a 3 or 3.5 is - I liked it. 4 is really great! - enjoyed it a lot. Sometimes, I like to watch truly terrible 80’s trash movies and get a lot of enjoyment out of those in a different way, so how many stars do they deserve?

I struggle a bit with favourite lists too. A different example: there’s so much music I like, too much.. I couldn’t possibly narrow it down to a top 5 ranking. When getting behind with leaving reviews, I would feel the weight of that unclosed loop.

It’s not free or open source

Another gripe with Letterboxd is that it’s injected with ads. In a web browser with ublock Origin you may not notice or be too bothered by that. If you get a lot of use out the service you could pay for premium to get rid of them.

When setting up my phone on GrapheneOS I carefully vetted which apps I would be allowing onto my device. A look at Exodus Privacy shows that Letterboxd was one of those Android apps that contains quite a few trackers. It’s only available through the Google Play Store (which I don’t use) and I prefer to stick with FOSS apps as much as possible these days.. unfortunately Letterboxd doesn’t fit the bill. If an app has ads and trackers in it, then it doesn’t get onto my device, it’s as simple as that. Using less of these proprietary services that require a log in identity, and are tracking behaviours and running nefarious background calls to advertisers makes me feel much more relaxed and content. A fully FOSS and privacy respecting Letterboxd alternative could possibly do quite well devs??

Have you thought about just keeping a list?

Letterboxd can be useful for tracking your habits but have you thought about just keeping a list? I do like to keep track of movies and shows I’ve watched in Org mode. A simple ‘watch.org’ file containing the date and time I watched something. Entries have a ’to watch’ or ‘watched’ status. When I come across something I might want to see I use ‘org capture’ to dump it into the queue (text file). That works pretty great for me. If I want to write some notes about a movie I can do it there, if I want to share my thoughts about it, I can write a blog post or something? I can look at ratings or reviews in many places online without having an account if I feel the need to.. that’s enough for me honestly.

I do believe in freedom of choice. I wouldn’t want this post to come across as “I’m quitting Letterboxd and you should too”. There are bigger baddies out there and we all have our own level of comfort with the services we use. If people are getting value out of it and expressing their passion for film that’s totally fine by me. I suppose my general feeling is that I’m seeing people doing brilliant things with the small web, indie web and Fediverse. Why not write about it there in a space that’s more of your own making? Maybe those quippy one liners could flourish into something more meaningful with a bit more space to grow.

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