The Letterboxd effect on film culture is real and I have mixed feelings about it.

On the positive side: Letterboxd has created a community of genuinely passionate cinephiles who watch more films more carefully than any previous generation had infrastructure for. The diary feature alone has changed how people engage with rewatching. The lists have made canon-formation visible and democratic in a way that film criticism never was.

On the negative side: the platform's gamification of watching has created incentives to watch and log rather than to sit with a film. The popular ratings tend to reward films that are emotionally immediate and punish films that are slow or formally challenging. And the review culture, while often brilliant, has a tendency toward hot takes that perform intelligence rather than practice it.

I still use it daily. I'm just trying to be conscious of how it shapes what I watch and how I watch it.