351 Messages

 • 

7.9K Points

Wednesday, March 26th, 2025 9:30 PM

No Status

5

More visibility options (e.g. "unlisted") for user lists

Currently, users who create lists are faced with only two options regarding their visibility: Public (visible to everyone) and private (visible only to self). It would be useful to have an option in between these two extremes; that is, an unlisted option, which would make the list visible to anyone with the link, but would block it from appearing in suggested lists or on the user's profile page. There are a number of reasons why a user would prefer to do this, including, but not limited to: - Sharing lists with family and friends (e.g. Movies to Watch This Weekend, Jill's Favorite Movies, Movies We Saw in 2024, etc.) - Sharing in-progress lists with colleagues/collaborators for proofreading, input, etc. before they are ready to publish - Sharing between teachers and students (for instance, a teacher of a film, literature or history class might assign films to view and/or comment on) Basically, anyone who wants to be able to share things between a few specific people, but not necessarily broadcast their interactions with the entire world. The current options force users to make a choice between absolute privacy or absolute visibility, which is often a bothersome dilemma. The whole reason why I thought of making this post right now is because I'm currently in the midst of working on a big project that involves a lot of research, writing and decision-making, and I'm thinking about getting help from some people I know with knowledge of the subject. However, it is far from being ready to go public yet. Unfortunately, the limited set of options means that the only way for me to show it to other people would be to either to give them full access to my IMDb account, or to set the list to public, opening it up to be viewed by literally anybody. Of course, I'm going to end up doing option two, but neither of those options are ideal. Some users have complained on this website that IMDb's user-created list suggestions are too cluttered with personal lists that are not really all that interesting to the general public. It's not hard to see what they're talking about. Lists with titles like "Watched in 2022", "all time watched", "Movies I Watched in 2023", "Movies to Watch", etc., are not hard to find on any related lists page. I'm guessing a lot (not all) of the users creating lists like those would prefer to be sharing them with only a few select people rather than the entirety of IMDb's user base. Taking my suggestion to add another option would therefore theoretically take away a lot of the clutter and make it easier for users to find lists that are actually carefully designed/curated and intentionally made to be viewed by everyone.

No Responses!