Who the hell thought this was a good idea? It would be bad enough with full-time professional human moderation, but automated moderation is going to miss a lot, which means that it’s going to be on your paying users to flag offensive content. And even then, in my experience, the people reviewing those reports do not understand structural oppression, so all but the most blatant racist, misogynistic, transphobic, homophobic, ableist material will stay visible and never be taken down.
Perhaps more importantly, people can and will use this feature for trolling. They will put spoilers in titles. And no matter how aggressive your after-the-fact moderation is–even if you hired professional full-time human moderators–spoilers will be visible for minutes, hours, days, or longer before they’re flagged and taken down.
The only way for a system like this to possibly work would be to require moderation of every topic and comment before it is posted. But that would be crushingly expensive, so you’d never do it.
It’s inexcusable that yet again a horrible, exploitable new “feature” that nobody wanted is opt-out instead of opt-in, crammed down everybody’s throats, so you can keep trying to turn yourself into a FAST social media site instead of the self-hosted, own-media streaming solution so many of us have been paying you for for so long.
It’s on for everybody by default, but you can turn it off in Settings > Experience > Discussions on Detail pages (I don’t see this in the web app, but it’s in the Android app).
I don’t really want to slow down my clients or my server, so I’ll disable it.
If it’s snappy enough, maybe some people will enjoy it. I just hope Plex won’t become like Fandom (which is a wiki farm): content being hard to access because of social features AND advertisement.
Moreover, this should be tied to discover or your account settings. No one in the right mind who disabled discover or ratings/reviews would want discussions. It’s all the same online crap!
The work they done on the NFO support and the transcoder updates but there are some others. Its the client side experience that is a bloody mess, most probably due to investor forced direction
So I can’t disable this at the account level directly?
I went looking for it in the client app settings on Roku after getting the promotional slideshow at startup and couldn’t find it under Experience settings to disable it which is why I came online to simply disable it account wide like I can every other similar feature. I see all the other options in BigWheel’s screenshot (likely from Apple or Android?) but not that one.
Heck I even have the Moonlight theme loaded myself too!
Edit:
So I checked and I don’t think I actually see any discussions on Roku. I saw the “welcome to discussions” feature introduction and immediately went to turn it off. Is there a conflict here on the Roku?
Also… put this option in the same account level control as the rest. If it’s not going to be a client specific option (see discussions on web but not on mobile to save screen space) then it should be managed from the account level just like all the other similar types of settings like watch indicators and reviews. This is pointless fragmentation - our intentional friction - which is just poor implementation either way.
Edit2:
I also checked my iOS devices. It is on there as long as I update to 2026.11 (had to double update on my iPad to get there).
I also checked Roku Plex Preview 9.11.7 (latest available) and the option isn’t there either. So at the very least this is not a consistent deployment experience (and indicative of a “mobile first” and app centric business model).
I’ve been a loyal Plex user for ages… No one asked for this… Plex seems to want to become the Facebook of streaming or something with all of this social…stuff… Please, get back to working on core features. I’m about ready to jump ship, enough is enough. I never thought I’d leave, but what the actual ****??
I’m willing to bet not a single user on this platform gives two sh!ts about these social features.
My last post speaking negatively about Plex was flagged and moderated, willing to bet this one will be too.
Discussions is part of a growing lineup of new and upcoming social features on Plex designed to bring movie and TV lovers together, spark conversation, and help you discover what to watch next. Be on the lookout for what’s coming next:
Lists: You can already create and share lists of movies, shows, and episodes on Plex, and soon, you’ll also be able to import lists from other platforms and add comments and reactions.
Match score: Get a personalized score for how much we think you’ll enjoy a movie or show based on your taste, ratings, and viewing history.
Content reactions: Go beyond star ratings with emoji-based reactions that capture how you feel.
Follow anything: Get alerted when there’s new activity on a list, movie, show, cast, or crew that you follow.
Comment with images: React to reviews, discussions, and more with images to add more to every conversation.
Also… www.plex.tv now automatically routes to watch.plex.tv … that’s new to me. No more product or company landing page, you gotta go to the footer to navigate to product or company pages unrelated to FAST channel platform.
