Is Letterboxd ruining movies?
NO SUCH THING
iHeartPodcasts and Kaleidoscope
4.6 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Letterboxd is a great tool for keeping track of movies and seeing what your friends and others are watching. But does constant logging, rating, and reviewing actually help us enjoy films? To find out, we spoke to Dr. Ruud Jacobs, who actually researched the impact of consumer movie reviews, and professional movie critic Tasha Robinson.
Dr. Jacobs' research can be found here, and you can hear Tasha on her own podcast, The Next Picture Show.
For more, visit www.nosuchthing.show
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Annie. |
| 0:01.2 | I'm Noah. |
| 0:01.9 | Mrs. Devin. And this is no such thing, the show where we answer our dumb questions and yours by actually doing the research. Today, we're talking about letterboxed and how it's changed the ways we watch movies, possibly for the worst. The part that freaks people out is that maybe it's for people who are like staring at TikTok or something. My God, everyone is so hot in this. |
| 0:21.3 | Very true. |
| 0:22.0 | That creeps me out. |
| 0:24.8 | There's no such thing. |
| 0:26.7 | No such thing. |
| 0:29.7 | No such thing. |
| 0:32.7 | No such thing. |
| 0:35.6 | No such a thing. |
| 0:40.6 | All right. So we all love movies. |
| 0:42.1 | That's right, yeah. |
| 0:42.9 | Yes, accurate. |
| 0:47.7 | And Letterbox has many great uses, but my concern is that turning movie watching into social media, data logging might hinder our engagement with the movies themselves. |
| 0:52.7 | So on this episode, I want to dig into how we use Waterboxed and try to find out what, |
| 0:57.2 | if any, impact this has on our movie watching experience. |
| 0:59.8 | Do we like movies more or less by committing to this cataloging and rating system? |
| 1:06.2 | But first, let's back up. |
| 1:07.7 | In case you have no idea what we're talking about, Letterbox is a social media app for logging movies. It was started by a couple web designers in New Zealand back in 2011, |
| 1:15.6 | but it saw a massive boost in popularity during COVID, going from about 1.8 million users in |
| 1:20.2 | March 2020 to roughly 13 million today. Over a billion movies have been logged on the app. |
| 1:25.3 | Users skew younger, the largest age group on the app being 18 to 24, |
... |
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