Wow, I just got an email last night saying that community.netflix.com was no more.  Turns out that Netflix was linking to a non-company owned and operated user community on NING, which is a large forum system where anyone can create a sort-of-good community for free, then they take all of the ad revenue from it.  The new community is http://netflixcommunity.ning.com as of yesterday.

Why did Netflix pull the plug? My guess is that it’s a factor of several things.

They don’t own it. First, they don’t own and manage the community as far as I can tell.  That gives them very little ability to moderate wayward, hateful or otherwise offensive messages as they don’t “control the microphone”, meaning that if someone has a petty gripe about something, they have free reign.  Any user can sign-up and report an site outage or a complaint that movies that are on a “very long wait”. Plus there is a whole section on the community for general gripes, otherwise known as the Netflix website section.

Not well integrated. Second, the lack of integration on Ning was only “ok”.  While there were menu-links going back into Netflix, and there must have been some type of API system in place to get the level of connectivity that was there, but I always got the idea that it was duct-tape and bailing wire overall.  I don’t think it was ever a single sign-on system.

Community Protest against Netflix changes. Ok, this might be the main cause, or the straw that broke the camel’s back.  Not sure.  But there is an active movement on the Netflix community to PROTEST Netflix changes to the website.  Wow, REALLY?  There are active “power users” on Netflix that post a lot of reviews, and in protest against changes on the movie-details-page and the loss of some social friending on the site, these users changed their movie reviews ON Netflix to a protest statement AGAINST Netflix! Honestly, this is the groundswell put into action.  For Netflix, this is horrible, but it’s very empowering for the users who joined this cause in support of their vision of Netflix.

What’s it all mean? Not sure yet, my guess from an SEO perspective that Netflix will take a hit while the search engines are leading people to links that don’t exist anymore.  SEO isn’t really Netflix’s strong suit, they have done an end-run around it with a very strong affiliate program.   I doubt it Netflix will help out Ning or the community by providing any type of backlink to help people find they way.  I got an email from the community saying that Netflix had pulled the plug, so that’s how I was notified.  Will Netflix start a new community?  Not sure about that, my guess is they will be gunshy about the whole thing for a while and will steer clear of this type of endeavour.

Have to strike the right balance. While I’m all for an open public forum where people can speak their mind (and have a five-plus year track record of running communities to prove this) but you can’t just let people have total free reign of the site.  It’s imperitave that some controls be put into place to bring this type of rebellion under control, to stop flames and trolling, and to generally keep the peace.