Would removing score stop review bombing.

[InfiniteCharger]

I think the problem they are facing atm is that the whole woke culture has(and still is) antagonizing everyone who isnt directly agreeing with them on everything and branding everyone(meaning like 90%+ of the world) as racists, bigots, women haters and so on. People are starting to get tired of it. Starting to get tired of the whole narrative around representation being key in everything.

So while there is certainly an actual opposition to woke culture that IS racist and bigoted - and woke culture definitely happened for a reason - its now overreached to a point where anti woke culture is no longer racist and bigots but just ordinary people.

I think the bigger issue is that a lot of the stuff being made today is just not good . In terms of TV series a lot of the free channels and cable channels have far better fare than streaming (and often free). Streaming has just created an environment where piles of money are handed out to make stuff in order to fill the schedule. And so the only way to artificially prop up a lot of this stuff is with marketing gimmicks about anything and everything except the quality of the show itself. But the marketing tactics of trying to elevate such shows based on social or cultural terms doesn't stop fix the quality of the show itself.

As for the reason for these social and cultural commentaries becoming so prevalent in marketing, it basically boils down to corporations playing CYA. A lot of them still have highly publicized cases of abuse and there is that history of the culture being a certain way and that still exists. So these leftist academics and their social and cultural paradigms which have become degree granting courses in many colleges and universities are just an easy win to give them good PR. At the end of the day the problems that were there before are still there and this is just a marriage of convenience to try and present the illusion of change and entertainment is in the business of creating illusions. Not to mention you cannot tell when the people promoting these things are saying as a reflections of their own thoughts or something they have been coached to say for promotion.

[Donald Hellscream]

The problem isn't someone looking at ONE review going "oh they gave it a 0/10 lol obviously that's bullshit".

The problem is a THOUSAND people giving 0/10 scores and having the overall average go down because of that, so someone goes "6/10 average? Basically garbage, then".

I agree from that point of view, it is much more problematic than my post made it out to be, in retrospect I should probably have considered that before posting.

[Xath]

The problem isn't someone looking at ONE review going "oh they gave it a 0/10 lol obviously that's bullshit".

The problem is a THOUSAND people giving 0/10 scores and having the overall average go down because of that, so someone goes "6/10 average? Basically garbage, then".

The problem is a 1000 people giving 10/10 scores pull it up to an 8/10 so somebody goes oh it's super good then.

It's really amazing how in your world the only bombing is negative.

[Biomega]

The problem is a 1000 people giving 10/10 scores pull it up to an 8/10 so somebody goes oh it's super good then.

It's really amazing how in your world the only bombing is negative.

Oh it absolutely isn't, and I've in no way implied it is. In fact several times earlier in this thread I've explicitly talked about that very thing.

But it also isn't equal. Both happen. But they don't happen equally.

[Xath]

Oh it absolutely isn't, and I've in no way implied it is. In fact several times earlier in this thread I've explicitly talked about that very thing.

But it also isn't equal. Both happen. But they don't happen equally.

They absolutely do though. If you think that online trolls put more resources into slamming stuff down then companies do into astro turfing I've got nothing to tell you.

[Swnem]

I don't see "review bombing" as a bad thing. If people didn't like their experience, that is a legitimate review. You can't force your bias into others and we really shouldn't be talking about doing that as customers. I understand companies want to hide unfavorable impressions, but customers should appreciate honesty.

[nvaelz]

Have the best of both worlds. Only your laziness will limit you from finding a review you'll enjoy reading.

[Biomega]

I don't see "review bombing" as a bad thing. If people didn't like their experience, that is a legitimate review.

That's not the definition of review bombing, though. It's people organizing and/or dummy-accounting to leave bad reviews in bad faith in order to DELIBERATELY tank a product's rating beyond what their personal assessment would indicate.

"I didn't like it so I'm leaving a bad review" is not in itself review bombing. It's just a bad review. Making 10 troll accounts to go "0/10 lolololol" is review bombing. Seeing a thread on 4chan asking people to go and leave a 0/10 review for a product no matter what they actually think is review bombing. And so on.

Whether or not "review bombing" also covers the inverse, i.e. leaving positive reviews in bad faith, or whether that should be called "review buffing" or whatever is up for debate. In the common vernacular it mostly refers to negative reviews and malicious intent, but you could well apply the same concept the other way round.

[Swnem]

That's not the definition of review bombing, though. It's people organizing and/or dummy-accounting to leave bad reviews in bad faith in order to DELIBERATELY tank a product's rating beyond what their personal assessment would indicate.

"I didn't like it so I'm leaving a bad review" is not in itself review bombing. It's just a bad review. Making 10 troll accounts to go "0/10 lolololol" is review bombing. Seeing a thread on 4chan asking people to go and leave a 0/10 review for a product no matter what they actually think is review bombing. And so on.

Whether or not "review bombing" also covers the inverse, i.e. leaving positive reviews in bad faith, or whether that should be called "review buffing" or whatever is up for debate. In the common vernacular it mostly refers to negative reviews and malicious intent, but you could well apply the same concept the other way round.

Define "in bad faith". Cause you disagree with them?
They are doing it cause they are dissatisfied. That is a valid opinion.
I don't see why they are less valuable than say a journalist being payed to review it and being unable to be completely honest for fear of reprisals.

These impressions, these dissatisfactions are genuine and legitimate. If someone goes to the trouble to leave feedback on a product, it's an opinion worth listening to. Why do you want to silence people?
In the end you get to form your own opinion. Why exactly should we silence the ones we don't like? That is not beneficial to us as consumers. Games reviews are not science. There are no right or wrong reviews. They are all subjective. You take all impressions and draw your own. But they are not facts. It sounds like you want to draw facts from the score and you will never be able to get that.

[Endus]

Just wanted to comment on the shape of the graph, and what you can deduce. A graph of ratings is something that forms a bell curve, generally; ratings will tend to cluster around a certain score, with fewer people scoring it much further away than that bell curve "peak"; This can be complicated somewhat by the granularity of the scoring; a wider range of scores will give more accurate curves, rating out of 100 would be more informative than rating out of 5, for instance, with enough reviews coming in. But the important point here is the curve, and the peak, because what we see in the graph above has that curve, but then there's the 1 and 10 scores, which also peak. As you noted, this is due to review bloat and brigading; people rate 10/10 to boost the score, or 1/10 to lower it, with the goal being to affect the score itself.

And that's why you see recommendations to drop the 1 and 10 scores completely, and look at what remains. Which here, would be a bell curve peaking around 6/10. Just eliminating those most-extreme scores means you don't even have to consider whether more people are pumping it up, or tearing it down; you eliminate the whole bunch regardless, and you're left with something more "honest". Sure, some people would have honestly rated it 10/10 or 1/10, but in a bell curve, those extremes have the least representation and make up the smallest proportion of data points, so you're not losing much, and what you gain by eliminating the dishonest ratings is worth a lot more. Of course, if that became official policy, they'd just shift to rating 9/10 or 2/10 to avoid the policy, so this is a meta-analysis that responds to where the unnatural peaks are.

You've also got to be careful because beloved or hated properties won't have a bell curve; they'll just be relatively empty before sharply spiking up at the 10/10 or 1/10 marks. Still, eliminating the extremes should still show where the initial curve lies. I grabbed this one for LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring because I figured (correctly) that it would have a strong rating that would show this;


If you eliminate 1s and 10s, you still end up with it curving up to a 9, so you still get the same impression; cutting the 10s out didn't actually change the interpretation of how scores fall.

Shapes and peaks matter more than averages, basically.




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These impressions, these dissatisfactions are genuine and legitimate. If someone goes to the trouble to leave feedback on a product, it's an opinion worth listening to. Why do you want to silence people?

Not listening to people is not the same as "silencing" them. If your position is so extreme as to be discarded as useless, that's your feedback failing to be useful or constructive. That's a "you" problem, not a problem with those who aren't paying attention to you.

In the end you get to form your own opinion. Why exactly should we silence the ones we don't like? That is not beneficial to us as consumers. Games reviews are not science. There are no right or wrong reviews. They are all subjective. You take all impressions and draw your own. But they are not facts. It sounds like you want to draw facts from the score and you will never be able to get that.

Opinions can also categorically be "wrong". You may have the opinion that the Earth is flat. You might believe in Nazism. There are opinions that are shitty, stupid, misinformed, or outright malicious, and thus deserving not just of not being given credence, but deserving of active scorn and rebuke. Saying "it's just my opinion isn't a defense; it's you seeking to avoid taking responsibility for your stated positions.

[Biomega]

Define "in bad faith". Cause you disagree with them?
They are doing it cause they are dissatisfied. That is a valid opinion.

Again, if that's what you honestly think, that's not review bombing.

If you're doing it for reasons OTHER than that you HONESTLY think they deserve that rating, that's more it.

Leaving an honest review, even a bad one, is not review bombing. And by honest I mean honest with yourself. Very few products honestly deserve 0/10. Or 10/10, for that matter.

I don't see why they are less valuable than say a journalist being payed to review it and being unable to be completely honest for fear of reprisals.

Dishonest professionals are also a problem (albeit a separate one). A 0/10 review tends to have "less value" on average because there's so few products really deserving of a 0/10 rating (or a 10/10 rating). A point-based scale is not simply a substitute for a binary like/dislike system. Giving things you like 10/10 and things you don't like 0/10 is not what the system is made for, and is a misuse of the system. Which means reviews that crassly outside the norm tend to have less value for people interested in the aggregative effect of a point-based system. The accuracy of that system relies on people using it correctly (on average). The more misused outliers, the worse the resulting data.

These impressions, these dissatisfactions are genuine and legitimate. If someone goes to the trouble to leave feedback on a product, it's an opinion worth listening to. Why do you want to silence people?

I want to silence people who AREN'T genuine and legitimate. That's the whole point behind a term like "review bombing" - it's an effect resulting from reviews that are neither genuine nor legitimate. Purging and curating bomb reviews has splash damage effects on legitimate reviews, though; that's absolutely true. It's an unfortunate side effect of such moderation measures, same as in any similar context.

But don't misunderstand: my point, really, is that ratings-based systems suck to begin with, and should be abolished in the first place. They're prone to misuse and abuse, and suggestive of a kind of reductive thinking that's ultimately counterproductive. They stink.

In the end you get to form your own opinion. Why exactly should we silence the ones we don't like?

We shouldn't. But review bombing isn't "any review I don't like". That's not what the term means.

[Flame6]

I generally like to take an aggregated critic and user score. They're generally where I fall on the scale. Reviews say a 7, and I'll likely say its a 7. This isn't always the case though. Days Gone has a metacritic of 7 for reviewers and I'd give the game a solid 9. If the product is more niche or indie (indie products always get way higher review scores then they deserve) then I generally have to just wing it.

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I let myself get distracted. Review bombing sucks, and if a product has a ton of 1's and a ton of 10's, then I'm forced to just disregard the whole score. I dont think removing the score is going to help that.

[Swnem]

Not listening to people is not the same as "silencing" them. If your position is so extreme as to be discarded as useless, that's your feedback failing to be useful or constructive. That's a "you" problem, not a problem with those who aren't paying attention to you.



Opinions can also categorically be "wrong". You may have the opinion that the Earth is flat. You might believe in Nazism. There are opinions that are shitty, stupid, misinformed, or outright malicious, and thus deserving not just of not being given credence, but deserving of active scorn and rebuke. Saying "it's just my opinion isn't a defense; it's you seeking to avoid taking responsibility for your stated positions.

If you find it useful or not is a decision you yourself make. It has nothing to do with people being able to leave it or not. I find it useful myself. Cause people are so dissatisfied with the product that there is something wrong with it. Now whether it affects me or not is a personal decision i make. But, i appreciate being informed about it.

Opinions can only be wrong when they pertain to facts. Subjective opinions are not facts. We can both say the same game is great or crap. Neither one is factually right or wrong.
Yes, which ones you choose to give a higher weight to will influence you differently. But they are all there and they are legitimate cause they are the opinion of the ones that left them.

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Again, if that's what you honestly think, that's not review bombing.

If you're doing it for reasons OTHER than that you HONESTLY think they deserve that rating, that's more it.

Leaving an honest review, even a bad one, is not review bombing. And by honest I mean honest with yourself. Very few products honestly deserve 0/10. Or 10/10, for that matter.


Dishonest professionals are also a problem (albeit a separate one). A 0/10 review tends to have "less value" on average because there's so few products really deserving of a 0/10 rating (or a 10/10 rating). A point-based scale is not simply a substitute for a binary like/dislike system. Giving things you like 10/10 and things you don't like 0/10 is not what the system is made for, and is a misuse of the system. Which means reviews that crassly outside the norm tend to have less value for people interested in the aggregative effect of a point-based system. The accuracy of that system relies on people using it correctly (on average). The more misused outliers, the worse the resulting data.


I want to silence people who AREN'T genuine and legitimate. That's the whole point behind a term like "review bombing" - it's an effect resulting from reviews that are neither genuine nor legitimate. Purging and curating bomb reviews has splash damage effects on legitimate reviews, though; that's absolutely true. It's an unfortunate side effect of such moderation measures, same as in any similar context.

But don't misunderstand: my point, really, is that ratings-based systems suck to begin with, and should be abolished in the first place. They're prone to misuse and abuse, and suggestive of a kind of reductive thinking that's ultimately counterproductive. They stink.


We shouldn't. But review bombing isn't "any review I don't like". That's not what the term means.

If you feel that strongly, advocate for a like and dislike system. Then there are no more issues. You shouldn't care about what the number is. It's an arbitrary scale to begin with. Different sites give different meaning to the scale. Are you gonna stop playing a game cause it has a 6/10? If that was the case i would call you shallow in your decision making. You know your taste. I am sure you can tell what you like by now. A subjective number should not affect that. If the customer is so dissatisfied, they choose to leave a 0/10, i am ok with that too. Or so satisfied they leave a 10/10 it's also fine. You are trying to push your interpretation of the scale into others. It's silly, really. Why do you give so much importance to this number that tells you nothing?

Well, i don't agree any are not legitimate. That is judgement you yourself are making. That is how you build your opinion. I don't see why you want to go and silence them. Are you afraid others can't reach a desired outcome? No review scale system is accurate. Sorry to say. As i said before and i will repeat. Reviews are personal opinions. There are no right and wrong ones cause neither is factual. This dumb number can be 0/10 and you can love the game and think it's a 10/10. We are different beings. What is good for one is not what is good for another.

For example, i enjoyed the cowboy bebop netflix series. Lots of people said it was terrible. Did i stop enjoying it because of that? I did not. I still think it's great. It's Subjective. It will always be subjective and what you want to do is take the voice out of other people cause you don't want to consider them. Well, you already have the power to do so yourself. So, trying to take the choice out of everyone else is extremely unproductive.

Who gets to decide which opinions are "review bombing"? What is the criteria for that? Cause that will be subjective too. At what point is that not censure? It's a steep road that does not lead to good results. Companies love that. They love to silence dissent so they can make more money. We consumers should fight those urges.

Also, i must ask you to stop thinking of the number as "what the game deserves". They are feedback on entertainment. You are measuring satisfaction. It's subjective. I think the problem is this urge to want a scale that is factual. That is really an exercise on futility.

[Aurabolt]

Removing the internet would also work.

This actually predates the internet believe it or not.

People would look forward to reading reviews in newspapers and would watch a movie or tv show based on the (bought and paid for) review they read. For too many even decades ago--I'm 38 for reference and remember those days in the 90s when the internet was in its infancy--if they didn't see a review and no one they knew was talking about it, it wasn't worth watching.

The internet and later social media actually leveled the playing field for small studios and indie movies as now they could promote themselves for free or very cheaply online.

[Aphrel]

I just ignore the reviews becasue they are indeed often just bullshit. Just look at the elden ring reviews etc...

What is 10x more relevant is to look at audience score instead. I very rarely see any movie where the audience score seems off from what i found. Ofc one must realize the scores follow the american scoring ideology where 7 = the average mean decent movie not great not terrible.
6= some problems and below 6 means large problems.
8= good, higher = very good.

What to remember thou is that audience score is often relevant to genre, etc if you are not into anime you probably wont enjoy even the very highly rated animes etc. Just as i wouldnt enjoy the very high rated dramas because i find them entirely uninteresting. But within their respective genres they are very relevant scores.

[kosajk]

(Was going to put this into the Rings of Power thread, but I think there is a bigger discussion to be had with this)

I could easily write a well thought out review and be fine with not numbering it.

I also think removing numbering will help stop review bombing because it will rely on the quality of the written review and reward said well written reviews over the 'show/movie is poo poo 1/10' type of reviews.

well it all depends if there is something new and you want to go to cinema and pay extra money for the show then looking and reading 2 or 3 reviews may be a good idea but if you are watching 2-3+ movies on a rainy evning in home reading couple reviews for them may take you more time than watching movies itself so with numerical indycator you can chose that 3 movies out of 50 on this week selection while using couple mins of time

its part of expresising your opinion, also not everone want to spent 20-30 mins on writing review on 1,5h movie ;P

review bombing is a problem for sure but its also not comming from nothing usually, when i see that im looking for reason behind

[Biomega]

If you feel that strongly, advocate for a like and dislike system. Then there are no more issues.

Those systems have other issues. Namely a lack of differentiation, and by no means are they immune to bombing effects - that's partly why YT removed the dislike count.

You shouldn't care about what the number is. It's an arbitrary scale to begin with. Different sites give different meaning to the scale.

That's a very different argument. I agree that those systems are idiotic, and no one should care. But people DO care, and in that context, they should get the best information they can. Review bombings make that information worse. That's why they are a problem, irrespective of whether or not I personally find the system as a whole useful.

You're effectively saying "what does it matter if someone shits on someone's lawn, you don't like lawns anyway". Which is ridiculous.

You are trying to push your interpretation of the scale into others. It's silly, really. Why do you give so much importance to this number that tells you nothing?

I don't, but people using the system do. Why do you think they DON'T deserve that system to provide as good information as it can? Why do you think it's okay if people not only use the system wrongly, but intentionally abuse it to taint the information of other people? Whether or not you or I personally like or use that system is irrelevant to whether or not OTHER PEOPLE like or use that system. Or do you think the system should only be protected if you personally have an interest in it? Isn't that really selfish?

Well, i don't agree any are not legitimate. That is judgement you yourself are making.

You don't agree that someone making fifty accounts to give a product they've never used fifty 0/10 ratings just to troll the company is not legitimate?

Are you okay?

Who gets to decide which opinions are "review bombing"?

Statistics, mostly. Active curation like IP checks and so on aside, these are largely automated processes that work on heuristics. They're not perfect discriminators of what is and isn't legitimate, but that's okay. The goal isn't perfection, it's statistical correction.

My problem is more with the issue in the abstract, not in a concrete, practicability use case scenario. I'm not interested in the engineering part, I'm interesting in systems critique. I want to find new, better ways of straddling between accuracy and practicality. Awareness of and safeguarding against review bombing is part of that.

At what point is that not censure?

I assume you mean censorship, and that's misapplied here. Private entities have always been able to curate their content. You getting banned from an internet forum for spouting hate speech, for example, would not be censorship in the sense that a government saying you can't make fun of the prime minister or you go to jail would be. Those are not the same thing. You voicing your opinion on someone's platform is a privilege, not a right. You HAVING an opinion is a right, but that doesn't give you the right to use other people's platforms to broadcast it, and it doesn't give you immunity from other people criticizing you for that opinion.

You're free to say anything you like. And I'm free to tell you what I think of your opinion. And you're NOT free to stay in my house if you say something I don't want said there.

That's how it works, and always has worked.

They love to silence dissent so they can make more money. We consumers should fight those urges.

We should, but that doesn't mean we should support trolls who leave fake reviews to tank ratings. This goes both ways.

[Khaza-R]

In my opinion reviews are only really helpful for lesser known series and movies. Any massive franchise nowadays is going to pull very divisive opinions and its just a matter of which base is more mobilized. Then you have stuff like mega corporations like Amazon owning review sites like IMDB, just casting doubt on any fair or objective basis for reviews on media they've produced.

[Linkedblade]

(Was going to put this into the Rings of Power thread, but I think there is a bigger discussion to be had with this)

I have always been a firm believer in disabling scores and just having written reviews, and I know I say that as someone who uses scores, but people put too much stock into a number over what the pros and cons of the film/show is. How many times you do see people make a big deal out of a score while never reading the review to wonder why, its always about the number, the number holds more power over the reasoning.

I could easily write a well thought out review and be fine with not numbering it.

I also think removing numbering will help stop review bombing because it will rely on the quality of the written review and reward said well written reviews over the 'show/movie is poo poo 1/10' type of reviews.

Honestly, those sites are trash. If the content seems interesting, then consume it. If not, then don't.

It's not as if there are any criteria that all reviewers use that's in any way objective.

If critics and the lay folk agree on a score, chances are that's close to how most people feel. If there is a huge difference between the two, i tend to trust the wider audience over critics.

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Just wanted to comment on the shape of the graph, and what you can deduce. A graph of ratings is something that forms a bell curve, generally; ratings will tend to cluster around a certain score, with fewer people scoring it much further away than that bell curve "peak"; This can be complicated somewhat by the granularity of the scoring; a wider range of scores will give more accurate curves, rating out of 100 would be more informative than rating out of 5, for instance, with enough reviews coming in. But the important point here is the curve, and the peak, because what we see in the graph above has that curve, but then there's the 1 and 10 scores, which also peak. As you noted, this is due to review bloat and brigading; people rate 10/10 to boost the score, or 1/10 to lower it, with the goal being to affect the score itself.

And that's why you see recommendations to drop the 1 and 10 scores completely, and look at what remains. Which here, would be a bell curve peaking around 6/10. Just eliminating those most-extreme scores means you don't even have to consider whether more people are pumping it up, or tearing it down; you eliminate the whole bunch regardless, and you're left with something more "honest". Sure, some people would have honestly rated it 10/10 or 1/10, but in a bell curve, those extremes have the least representation and make up the smallest proportion of data points, so you're not losing much, and what you gain by eliminating the dishonest ratings is worth a lot more. Of course, if that became official policy, they'd just shift to rating 9/10 or 2/10 to avoid the policy, so this is a meta-analysis that responds to where the unnatural peaks are.

You've also got to be careful because beloved or hated properties won't have a bell curve; they'll just be relatively empty before sharply spiking up at the 10/10 or 1/10 marks. Still, eliminating the extremes should still show where the initial curve lies. I grabbed this one for LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring because I figured (correctly) that it would have a strong rating that would show this;

[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/sl0YyRh.png[IMG]
If you eliminate 1s and 10s, you still end up with it curving up to a 9, so you still get the same impression; cutting the 10s out didn't actually change the interpretation of how scores fall.

Shapes and peaks matter more than averages, basically.

[IMG]https://imgur.com/sl0YyRh[IMG]
[IMG]https://imgur.com/sl0YyRh[IMG]

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Not listening to people is not the same as "silencing" them. If your position is so extreme as to be discarded as useless, that's your feedback failing to be useful or constructive. That's a "you" problem, not a problem with those who aren't paying attention to you.



Opinions can also categorically be "wrong". You may have the opinion that the Earth is flat. You might believe in Nazism. There are opinions that are shitty, stupid, misinformed, or outright malicious, and thus deserving not just of not being given credence, but deserving of active scorn and rebuke. Saying "it's just my opinion isn't a defense; it's you seeking to avoid taking responsibility for your stated positions.

Talking about bell curves doesn't make sense here. We're talking about an opinion with no objective measure. This data isn't normalized and isn't done with random sampling.

Most of the time it comes to a simple "Was it good?" then yes=10, no=0 or 1, and alright/okay= 5-7. But again the people being polled aren't a true random sample, and there's nothing to really demarcate where a 6 ends and 7 begins.

And in those cases you cant just remove 1 and 10. The twilight example you remove half of your population, and for the LOTR you remove almost a third. You're also accounting for biases, like people that only review movies, not all movie watchers, and further a bias that only shows people that go to your particular website.

[Doctor Amadeus]

No because the kinds of people that do this are such control freaks about what anybody and everybody could like they would find another way, while those that actually use reviews and take them in context they are going to be without yet one more tool.

You want to fix it here is how.

1. Create a system for where people giving an actual vote or view can't be anonymous. It's a movie review if the person can't be bothered to put anymore effort in being credible, then whatever their view on whatever content is meaningless.

2. Weed out reviews from Jackasses people are unable to give even a basic critique. For example, Don't go see "________" because it "Blows V.S Hey I didn't like "________" here is why you shouldn't go see it. "The Story was confusing, The acting was terrible and unconvincing, the plot was incomplete missing information"

You don't have to know every element or be too articulate to do a review. but if the person really puts no effort in it then yeah. Which is why POLLS for example in and of themselves without context are meaningless.