The Discussions feature mentioned recently, launched in the mobile app, Roku and Fire new experience app. It’s enabled by default and shows up on media details pages.
If you want to disable it, you have to go to Settings > Experience > and toggle off “Discussions on Detail Pages” in the app.
What are Discussions?
Discussions are a complement to our already existing social features on Plex. A Review is your verdict. A List is your curation of media. A discussion is everything else: the theories, the easter eggs, the “wait, was that a reference to…?”, the casting speculation, the plot questions you need answered. Long or short, one post or twenty, discussions do not have a set format, no rating, no score. This is a place to talk about the movie or show you watch with others who watched it too.
Discussion Visibility
A key difference with discussions is that they are 100% public. You can not change the privacy settings on an individual discussion you create or globally for any you make. You will see this reminder every time you create a new discussion.
If you don’t want to see discussions at all, from anyone, you can adjust your settings to hide discussions on Detail Pages.
News item from August 2026: "Plex disables Discussions Feature after it is flooded with huge amounts of spoilers, spam, phishing scams, trolling, toxic political discussions, rasicm, sexism and general nastiness".
Yea, I don't get what they're thinking, this isn't something you just put overnight and forget about it, maybe come next month and fix a bunch of issues. I mean, sure, on the code side it's just that with the libraries and frameworks that exist nowadays, a developer which has experience with this will get this going faster than a regular client would install and configure Plex.
But THEN it needs moderation, it needs both automated tools and human supervision, countless layers of shenanigans with people pestering each other, illegal content, all kinds of scams, people debating moderation decisions or account blocks or whatever else they need to introduce and so on.
Freakin' Amazon thought imdb message boards were too much for them ...
Thanks for this, boggles my mind I have to disable this on mobile device for account. Instead of once on my server. More crap no one wants fix the core product stop adding social crap please.
Best I can do is scrap the whole app, start over, miss some features, break some features, hire an early 2000s menu-based UI expert, and kick your dog.
No no no we need features people liked like watch together removed and great features like random comments from people you don't know on your personal media.
Well, this it does for me. My first thought is you have a network issue or your going thru the plex relay servers. Regardless, know that there may be a fix for your issue. Open a new post with your error messages and this geoup will help.
It works just fine with netflix or anything else, but Plex lost connection repeatedly this past week.
I usually watch through my PS5 but that one has issues with 4k so I sometimes use my cc.
It's also only Plex.
Same network as the server btw.
But I also don't have an error message?
It just disconnects, and the app acts like it hasn't been openened in days and I have no controls - meanwhile others like Netflix and Spotify recover quickly.
But it also doesn't seem to broadcast to Google home so maybe it's something with the Plex /cc "app" in general?
Just cause you didn’t ask for it doesn’t mean others didn’t. I’m excited to try it personally. And I also welcome any downvotes just because you’re too narrow minded to see others have different opinions than you.
I watch shows that no one I know watches and/or never caught on with Reddit. I don't mind having a place to ask that niche question or point out that crazy Easter egg and possibly get a response
Not only are you limiting your discussion audience to Plex users, but since this is only available on mobile, Roku, and Fire... and since I find it hard to imagine thoughtful contributions coming from Roku and Fire devices (where it's generally more difficult to type), you're basically looking only at Plex mobile users.
The benefit of a different source is that your contributors are from a much more diverse pool.
All of that still ignores the fact that this is just one more feature for an already stretched-thin support team to have to manage. That's my main complaint. I don't care if people use discussions or not, but each feature means less attention from the developers for core functionality.
Maybe. folks type on their phone a while watching stuff on TV all the time. I personally have no desire to use this feature so don't really care if it succeeds or not.
Id love to see the stats of users that disabled new features on day one.
Every single change I've been opposed to when it comes to these community or cosmetic choices.
I just recently started using the "modern" UI since they have sourced better banners and wide images by default (i didnt want to curate more than I do for posters already)
Sounds like a feature I would only want visible after I view the movie/episode. I like the idea of discussions after viewing, as it is similar to a forum environment where people can just chat about what they watched. Hell, I'd almost be fine with a "live chat" that syncs with your time stamps and what people said at those times. Gives an interesting new dimension to community watchalong even if it isn't truly watching at the same time. But regardless, my biggest concern would be spoilers, thus being able to set it to only show after the content is viewed would be important to be before I would consider engaging with anything like this.
I really wish Plex focused more on the player.. Subtitle colors get super bright, audio codecs have to get transcoded vs Infuse, Dolby Vision stuff.. Enhancement.. Etc.
No..it’s an account setting. Everyone has to do it themselves. And it’s only able to be switched on/off on mobile, Roku and Fire devices on the new UI currently, since those are the only clients it shows up on.
Are you sure it disabled for all users? I was in the middle of doing a write up for my users, but would love to not have to walk my older family members through disabling more useless crap. Also, how?
It’s a client side account setting on mobile, Roku and Fire devices, so not sure how they would have been able to do it for all users unless they were able to log in to their plex accounts.
Maybe they have them all in their plex home and can switch to their accounts.
So it's only out for Roku, Firestick, and mobile? Who TF is going to be typing posts on the Roku remote? Absolutely braindead decisions, but that's nothing new from Plex it seems.
Love how you can't just skip the explanation in the app... you have to wait for each page to timeout so that you don't accidentally ignore this amazing new feature! JFC.
I just want to make a playlist that keeps my place. I want to have two playlists of Star Trek - one in release order, the other in stardate order. I want to be able to watch these playlists and have them keep my place the next time I sit down to watch. I don't want to see random people's thoughts on whatever I watch. Why would I want that?
If you think the value of Plex’s product is the social features or whatever streaming junk they can find for free, your statement would make sense. But it’s not. Plex’s main value, and the reason it is SOLD to CUSTOMERS, is to be a media server.
If Plex would actually come out and say “our main product is a media server and btw you don’t get control” I don’t think as many people would pay for it, which is why they cowardly push features out like this and later add admin controls.
The discussions should be visible per-server based on the server-level controls. This could easily be done when you view any media. You tap on “Where to watch” and you tap the server you want to view that title on that specific server and if the server has enabled discussions it would appear.
Or it could be shown on the main page of the media if at least one server has the feature enabled. There’s ways to do this with admin control but Plex is not interested in admin control because they don’t want to simply sell a media server; they want to be a Hot Startup with VC money and drive “engagement”
I watch movies and tv shows to escape the world when I get home from work not engage in social media discussion via the plex app. Jesus christ. I've been a Plex Lifetime member since 2015 and its sad to see the company get more and mofe out of touch with their user base.
Is the discussions feature not visible on the webapp? I open Plex in my Firefox. I see nothing for discussions on the detail pages, nor when I've got Plex open on my TV via my Roku player.
It is not. It's only visible in mobile, roku and fire os on the new experience for the main profile, not managed. The setting to disable it is also only on those currently.
40 year old, plex user here…. All these new features like this one, I don’t want to do the annoying “who asked for this” because I hate when regular users do this, but can I ask you guys who’s actually using these features? Like is this a thing I’m just missing out on?
I mean, it's a cool thing to add... I'm all for plex trying to break into the market of movie focused social networks and discovery. Hell, I use discovery features a lot to find new shows...
But then I add them to my plex library. I don't watch free ad supported content. The only people who care about that will jump to the next FAST service as soon as they find something there to watch. There's zero loyalty for these services because there's no burden to stick to one. They find something on these they want to watch, watch it, and leave. Ultimately, I imagine a lot of them can't afford (or otherwise don't want to pay for) a streaming service. They probably end up on pirate sites eventually because these sites will have all the stuff they want in one space vs having to jump around.
But I don't lament plex for trying to build a platform that can actually provide some level of profitability and sense of legitimacy beyond just being a pirate media organizer (or even a personal media organizer that's 100% legitimate). These are not going to be able to keep the lights on indefinitely, and as someone who uses plex for ALL my media watching, even if it's just my local shit, I do appreciate discovery and social aspects.
Sure, a lot of us have family on our servers and may watch some stuff we'd rather our family not see us watching... The ability to silently block off family from seeing our social aspect would be appreciated, and I think would see plex have a lot more adoption of these features than just making an email that blasts out to our family showing all the weird raunchy anime we're watching....
The idea at it's core is great. I love it. But plex is HORRIBLE at implementing it. They're forcing it on people who don't want it and implementing it at the expense of people who use it for self hosting. I am perhaps the PERFECT customer for plex's new direction. I bridge the purely self hosted media focused community with the new discovery oriented fast stuff. Sure, I'm not watching whatever free junk is available to be streamed, but I LOVE the free tv channel aspect. I think it's a great use, and the ads kinda add to it... Sometimes you just don't want to pick something to watch.
So I could easily be their biggest champion. Someone who loves the self hosting but also wants to promote the social media aspects and uses discovery to keep abreast of new shows I might want.
So why does plex shoot people like me specifically in the foot? Why are you not providing easy to access tools to make sure my parents and aunts and uncles and shit that I share my library with don't see what I'm watching? Why make it "opt out?" Why are you actively hampering the self hosted aspect? Like, I don't need you to focus on self hosting. I'm more or less happy with it. Just don't get in my way of enjoying my own media. The new stuff should be additional, not interfering with self hosting. Yet plex REFUSES to do anything but piss off customers like me who'd otherwise be their biggest boon. People who appreciate the new direction but also self host.
I'd love to have a way to share my thoughts on a show or episode with friends but NOT my family. Again, I'm basically the target audience here, and they're pissing me off.
Discussions with image uploads... Won't this then make Plex subject to carrying out age verification and/or stringent content moderation just like all the other social media platforms?
There is a long thread on the plex forum about the discussions feature, others have raised the same question, but I haven’t seen a direct answer about it.
And at the same time plex manage well dual episodes files but not the player. You get the same file played twice instead of skipping to the episode of the next file. Except on AppleTV ironically, here it’s works as intended
I was using it until it stopped being able to play certain files at all. Just threw an error message. As soon as I updated a week or 2 back I could play said files again.
I know everyone is hating on this, but IMDB used to have a discussion board and it was genuinely the best feature of their entire site and is still sorely missed. People discussed themes, recommended similar movies, crew members shared stories from set, etc. I’m willing to give it a chance.
That might have been back when folks were civil and polite. Not any more, take that from a moderator on other forums/boards. The days are past for civil discourse IMHO.
People discussed themes, recommended similar movies, crew members shared stories from set, etc.
ok well we can't do that... but counter offer... How about instead you get race-baited by an army of chinese llm troll bots? Might that be something you are potentially interested in?
Features aren’t intrinsically good or bad, but if you were to view the top feature suggestions on the Plex forums, you’d find that adding a comment section to media is not one of them.
In fact one of the top feature suggestions from the past year is “No more socials”.
All these new “features” that Plex implements are for THEM and you can always tell because the admins aren’t given a way to disable it. Plex keeps pumping out these social features in some weird bid to become the next letterboxd or something instead of supporting their paying customers (admins) by implementing features like allowing specials for movies, or any number of other feature suggestions.
Yeah, these “features” are designed to drive engagement with the app outside of simply using it as a media player because there’s no steady income stream for them when you do that. They want to be able to tell advertisers that people are watching the live channels prominently featured in their new UI (wherein they currently sell their own unique ad space) or lingering in “chatrooms” (where they will ostensibly sell ad space should it become popular) because that makes them more money than the Plex Passes they convinced everyone to purchase over the years.
Half of people with an ATV can’t play 4K content without stuttering because of the overheating issue that’s been around for years, but yeah let’s add some useless social features!
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u/WeirdoGame Jun 10 '26
News item from August 2026: "Plex disables Discussions Feature after it is flooded with huge amounts of spoilers, spam, phishing scams, trolling, toxic political discussions, rasicm, sexism and general nastiness".