Would removing score stop review bombing.

[Biomega]

Or, stay with me, make shows that people won't hate. It's like if people dislike something for certain reasons their displeasure doesn't count. Maybe every review of spicy mcnuggets saying it's too spicy should be deleted.

Some moderation is necessary, though - on all sides of the spectrum. Let's take your spicy nuggets example. You're saying if people don't like spicy foods why are they eating spicy nuggets and giving them 0/10 ratings; and that's a legitimate concern. But the reality is that what you're REALLY faced with is people who DO like spicy foods eating those nuggets and going "they came in a green box not a red box, 0/10" or "I didn't like the name, 0/10" or something equally tangential that should have no or at least only limited bearing on the score. Or it could be as simple as "didn't like them, 0/10" which is equally unhelpful.

Score-based ratings systems are different from like/dislike binaries for a reason, but many people incorrectly treat them the same. That's bad for everyone.

Serious question have you actually looked at how many new shows come out in a year now? There's everything on network tv then there's amazon then there's netflix then there's hbo then there's hulu then there's a bunch of other platforms plus animated shows. There is a lot of absolute junk. There is a need for scores because there is so much content and not that much time.

Isn't that an argument AGAINST simplistic systems prone to manipulation rater than for them? You want reliable information, but the more things are skewed by review bombing (towards the positive OR negative) the less reliable that information becomes. And the more supply there is, the more important the reliability of that information for the consumer.

I get that simply replacing a 1-10 score system (or something equivalent) with "read through 2,500 half-page reviews why dontcha?" is not a practicable solution in any way, but having aggregators pad numbers or have trolls review-bomb titles for arbitrary reasons isn't a good system either. There has to be some middle ground somewhere.

[owbu]

Or, stay with me, make shows that people won't hate. It's like if people dislike something for certain reasons their displeasure doesn't count. Maybe every review of spicy mcnuggets saying it's too spicy should be deleted.

The problem isn't that people can't leave bad reviews for disliking something for a niche reason. Statistics would take care of that.

If one in a thousand people watching leave a review and one person who hates looking at feet gives the show a bad review because it has too many feet in it, it would change the score by the correct amount (hardly at all).

The problem is that groups gather online to use the review side as a political messaging tool which makes the score lose all meaning.
Suddenly you have your normal 500 reviews from normal viewers (from 500000 people watching), but also all 300 feet haters in the world left a one star review which then triggered /r feetloverz to counterbomb to get the score back to the "true" number and so on.

And that just makes the score lose all meaning, because in reality, only 1% of people actually cared about the whole feet issue but most of the reviews on the side came from one of the two tiny groups who really really care about it.

It's basically Goodhart's law. You can't make the score the target or else it becomes useless.

[deenman]

Removing the internet would also work.

oh yeah,the collapse of society would be just rosey

[Gumble]

Isn't that an argument AGAINST simplistic systems prone to manipulation rater than for them? You want reliable information, but the more things are skewed by review bombing (towards the positive OR negative) the less reliable that information becomes. And the more supply there is, the more important the reliability of that information for the consumer.

I get that simply replacing a 1-10 score system (or something equivalent) with "read through 2,500 half-page reviews why dontcha?" is not a practicable solution in any way, but having aggregators pad numbers or have trolls review-bomb titles for arbitrary reasons isn't a good system either. There has to be some middle ground somewhere.

Yep. Scored based reviews are basically useless. That is why reviewers work best. You get an idea for who likes the kind of stuff you like and GENERALLY what they recommend you can safely assume you will like too.

You can even use reviewers who are financially dependent on the studios. You just ignore their positive reviews (those are generally paid for). If they give negative reviews then chances are there is a good reason (because they were willing to not take the money to say otherwise).

[Darkeon]

Ignore the 1s and ignore the 10s. There, fixed review bombing.
Only bad shows worry this much about "review bombing".

[Gumble]

Only bad shows worry this much about "review bombing".

Amazing that!

This never seems to happen to good shows. Wonder why that is...

[Pratt]

If one in a thousand people watching leave a review and one person who hates looking at feet gives the show a bad review because it has too many feet in it, it would change the score by the correct amount (hardly at all).

The problem is that groups gather online to use the review side as a political messaging tool which makes the score lose all meaning.

But if you know that the most passionate people leave reviews, and you know that showing lots of feet is a political hot potato, and you intentionally make a series that gives naked feet center stage, knowing that you're making a political point, and then dismiss all the anti-feet reviews as illegitimate... I'm not sure how I feel about that.

[Biomega]

But if you know that the most passionate people leave reviews, and you know that showing lots of feet is a political hot potato, and you intentionally make a series that gives naked feet center stage, knowing that you're making a political point, and then dismiss all the anti-feet reviews as illegitimate... I'm not sure how I feel about that.

That presupposes that all of that is actually the case. What if not everyone agrees that showing feet IS a political issue? Or that showing them IS "making a political point"? What if it's just the anti-feet people who consider it a political issue, and everyone else is just, you know, sick of seeing hands all the time and thinks feet deserve some screen time, too, for a change?

How do you evaluate dismissing "passionate" anti-feet reviews THEN?

[Usernameforforums]

There will always be a score. Remove the 5/10/100 score system and what do we have after that? Recommend or not recommended. After that all it takes is to score the percentage of recommended or not and you still have a 100 base system.

So no. It won’t stop review bombing.

[Snufflupagus]

On Goodreads reviews get likes, and by default the most “liked” review sits at the top. That means there’s a rating that dominates (i.e grabs the most likes) but it’s also directly attached to the rationale behind it, so if the review is just bombing you can see that it’s foolish. I think that’s a good solution.

Really the problem is the weird faith people put in crowdsourced reviews (I love you guys but if I’m honest I don’t give a shit what you think about anything) and the weird attachment people form so they feel review bombing is a worthwhile thing to do. Absent the latter, review “scores” would probably be more reliable; absent the former, we wouldn’t have to worry about all this nonsense and reviews could go back to being a critical engagement with the substance of the thing.

[Biomega]

Really the problem is the weird faith people put in crowdsourced reviews (I love you guys but if I’m honest I don’t give a shit what you think about anything) and the weird attachment people form so they feel review bombing is a worthwhile thing to do. Absent the latter, review “scores” would probably be more reliable; absent the former, we wouldn’t have to worry about all this nonsense and reviews could go back to being a critical engagement with the substance of the thing.

The IDEA behind crowdsourced reviews/ratings is sound - the wisdom of crowds giving you a better statistical approximation than any individual review/score could, on average.

The problem is that the process is vulnerable to attack and misuse. Statistics average out data, but that only produces useful information if the responses are unbiased. As soon as you flood biased data into the statistic, things start going awry.

Double layers can mitigate this, but they don't prevent it. Then again, few things could ever hope to - it's more about approximation, and practicability. I don't know what the most workable solution would be, especially since there's not just anarchic vandalism at play here but directed, malicious manipulation. It's difficult to safeguard against that kind of intent and remain practical AND useful.

[Snufflupagus]

The IDEA behind crowdsourced reviews/ratings is sound - the wisdom of crowds giving you a better statistical approximation than any individual review/score could, on average.

No it isn’t. “The wisdom of crowds” (an amusing idea, given that crowds are proverbially unwise) being of any use requires that:

A) there is some consensus “correct” position which can be arrived at, and
B) the crowd is on average competent to arrive at it.

Neither of those things are true. I thought Game of Thrones was trash from episode one, never enjoyed Harry Potter, and my favourite film is Away We Go with Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski.

No consensus is ever going to arrive at that, so (A) cannot possibly be satisfied. Insofar as it’s impossible to reach a consensus on what’s good it is impossible for people to be more or less competent at predicting that consensus, so (B) can’t be satisfied. QED, “the wisdom of crowds” is worthless in this context.

The whole notion of an uncomplicated numerical rating is infantile for exactly the same reason. Without explaining what film they’d call a one and a ten, any given person’s rating is irreconcilable with everyone else’s, and given that there’s no accounting for taste it’s irrelevant anyway. All you can usefully do is speak to what you do and don’t like in a given film.

[Gumble]

Reminds me of two quotes:

Men in Black
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

Wizard's First Rule
People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.

[Rennadrel]

No it isn’t. “The wisdom of crowds” (an amusing idea, given that crowds are proverbially unwise) being of any use requires that:

A) there is some consensus “correct” position which can be arrived at, and
B) the crowd is on average competent to arrive at it.

Neither of those things are true. I thought Game of Thrones was trash from episode one, never enjoyed Harry Potter, and my favourite film is Away We Go with Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski.

No consensus is ever going to arrive at that, so (A) cannot possibly be satisfied. Insofar as it’s impossible to reach a consensus on what’s good it is impossible for people to be more or less competent at predicting that consensus, so (B) can’t be satisfied. QED, “the wisdom of crowds” is worthless in this context.

The whole notion of an uncomplicated numerical rating is infantile for exactly the same reason. Without explaining what film they’d call a one and a ten, any given person’s rating is irreconcilable with everyone else’s, and given that there’s no accounting for taste it’s irrelevant anyway. All you can usefully do is speak to what you do and don’t like in a given film.

Well there's certainly no wisdom behind reviews by people whose financial best interests are most effected, because opinions can easily be bought and sold through all sorts of backdoor deals that people are willingly ignorant of happening.

[Beefhammer]

I find it surprisingly reliable. More often than not when a show or a movie is around 7 on imdb it's because it is no masterpiece and anything below 6 is usually riddled with problems.

Is the scoring perfect? Nope. Review bombing exists? Yep. It goes both ways though and they usually cancel each other out. See rings of power 10/10 review bombing as the latest example.

Not even close to evening out. Far more review bombs of little to no relevance compared to the obvious bribed good reviews.

Personally I don't give a shit what other players think about a game so I would never even look at a user score. Critic reviews IMO are useless to me as well. I'd rather buy something I'm I interested in and risk it not being good. Reading reviews can create bias. Too often I read or watch reviews of games people didn't play at the time due to bad reviews giving the perception of a bad game, yet people need up years later, trying it out, and liking it.

To the OP, of course removing scores would stop review bombing. Bombing works because it lowers an aggregate score. Without that, no one is going to sit and read 1000s of reviews. If they do, it's pretty obvious which are BS(good or bad).

- - - Updated - - -

There will always be a score. Remove the 5/10/100 score system and what do we have after that? Recommend or not recommended. After that all it takes is to score the percentage of recommended or not and you still have a 100 base system.

So no. It won’t stop review bombing.

Nothing. Leave it to the potential on the fence buyer to read/watch reviews and make their determination based off that was said. There is no need for any rating/ranking system or recommended type moniker.

[Biomega]

No it isn’t. “The wisdom of crowds” (an amusing idea, given that crowds are proverbially unwise) being of any use requires that:

A) there is some consensus “correct” position which can be arrived at, and
B) the crowd is on average competent to arrive at it.

Neither of those things are true. I thought Game of Thrones was trash from episode one, never enjoyed Harry Potter, and my favourite film is Away We Go with Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski.

You're misunderstanding what "consensus" means in that context. It means the AVERAGE person thinks X - not that any one individual does. The fact that the average reaction of the crowd is not the same as your personal reaction isn't relevant to that. Your standard cannot possibly be "everyone on average has to think exactly as I do", that'd be ludicrous to expect.

No outside rating or review system in the world is ever going to deliver to you exact matches to your personal opinion and preference. How could it.

As for B)... that's usually where the problems appear. Not so much because people aren't professional critics (that's fine, neither are most viewers) but because they don't use the system correctly.

[ClassicPeon]

I still dont really get the point of calling it review bombing. If people do not like something they dont like it.

[Fencers]

I still dont really get the point of calling it review bombing. If people do not like something they dont like it.

"Review bombing" is generally bad faith arguments from users or bots. That is the "issue" in a general sense. In a practical sense, it is only a matter of optics for content producers.

Companies can hire people to review bomb/upvote at a whim. The problem is other companies do this too. So are competitive if a content owner engages on that level against another genre product they own.

User reviews are not considered valuable because they are openly and easily manipulated. Platforms that offer user reviews are the only benefactors of user reviews until they sell direct advertising packages.

[Rozz]

Ignore the 1s and ignore the 10s. There, fixed review bombing.
Only bad shows worry this much about "review bombing".

Not true, because it's toxic in the other direction. MAL for instance has serious issues with popular shows getting review boosted because they're popular. If a show even gets close to beating FMA numerically, they'll actually spam perfect scores to keep their favorite at the top. Theyll also try to nuke the score of the competing show. Similar issues on other sites.

Those shows are still good, but are they peak of their entire field? No. Or shows with a 9/10 at episode 1. That's stupid.

[kenn9530]

I find it surprisingly reliable. More often than not when a show or a movie is around 7 on imdb it's because it is no masterpiece and anything below 6 is usually riddled with problems.

Is the scoring perfect? Nope. Review bombing exists? Yep. It goes both ways though and they usually cancel each other out. See rings of power 10/10 review bombing as the latest example.

10/10 reviews are more realistic than just giving a 1/10 though because many ppl will just enjoy it for what it is, where the hardcore lore strict fans will hate everything that is not 100% accurate or doesnt portray what they think it should be.