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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> Each critique is then evaluated to determine whether it’s genuine or a forgery created by a bot, troll or other breed of digital goblin.

In general, this sounds like a good idea to me. There are a lot of reviews that aren't in good faith, or aren't useful because they're something like "0/10 this sucks" or "10/10 lol", and I don't really see those as valuable — in fact, the opposite.

However, the evaluation of what reviews are and aren't worth keeping would have to be done by an independent third party, not the company that produced the show, and who has an obvious conflict of interest.

Amazon would never do something like that, which is why as a rule I would keep in mind that reviews for Amazon products on Amazon platforms are not reliable (to the extent that any crowd-sourced reviews are reliable, which is a different conversation).

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I find it very interesting that Amazon, after years of criticism for not doing anything regarding sellers gaming reviews, pauses reviews on the product they spent a billion dollars on.

They actually instituted it earlier, but it's just being noticed/discussed now in the context of the Rings show.

Yea, they alsp began shitting on Tolkien fans preemptively by saying if ypi don't like it you're against diversity, etc.

It's no accident they enacted this shortly before releasing such a steaming pile of IP monetization.

Again- this is Amazon, who have shown they have no regard for laws, or their customers, and have a strained relationship with the truth to say the very least.

I'd bet dollars to donuts no one knew about this policy because it was never enforced until now.

The first instituted a few months ago... for another Amazon show.

Add to this the fact that they recently deleted all reviews on this show with a rating lower than 6 from IMDB, which confirms for me that they are not to be trusted to be subjective about this at all.

I wonder what the decision process about this is like. It’s as if this show is “too big to fail”, and management is scrambling to make it appear a success.

It’s at 39% at Rotten Tomatoes. Ouch!

I love fantasy but this series has me pretty indifferent.

That's audience score which is being review bombed just like the IMDb ratings. So i wouldn't pay much attention to that

The critics have it around 80%, so the truth is in the middle?

Possibly yes. The only way to find out is time. Because review bombers tend to stop after the first few days. So the future reviews will tend to be more reliable than the early reviews

A quick look at Rotten tomatoes top critics score of all time is a good reminder why one should take critic score with a big row of salt

That’s basically every review aggregator ever.

I'd say not. The problem is that many 'critics' are just randoms like you and I.

'critics' giving it 8/9/10 out of 10 aren't being truthful.

I love how people are all 'you can't rate a show that just came out!' but critics have done just that as well.

Reading the RT 'critics'[1] we find there are a total of three critics (none of them 'top critics'. We have a 7/10, a 3.5/5 and a fresh score. Somehow that translates to an 84% score at the moment.

Why are bullshit high reviews not considered 'positive review bombing'?

[1] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_lord_of_the_rings_the_...

Calling a review a "bomb" is just a rhetorical trick for invalidating somebody else's opinion.

By all means, remove bot posts. But A slew of negative reviews from real people is not that.

Depends. If they're reviewing it without watching it, then I'm fine with their "opinion" being filtered. We don't need to amplify twitter outrage.

Amazon/IMDB have that information, so they could have done that. But they didn't; instead they removed all the bad reviews.

That’s the smoking gun to me: no way that every review lower than 6 was a bot, they’re not even pretending to act in good faith.

Whatever you call it, a score infiltrated by people (or not) who haven't seen or care for the material has no value for me.

The value of aggregate reviews is to tell if I want to watch something. Amazon might be treading a dangerous line, but it appears to be in my interest.

> people (or not)

There's the dehumanizing language I'm talking about. By all means delete the actual bot reviews, but that's not what Amazon did. They removed all the bad reviews, and their sycophants online use dehumanizing language to justify it.

That's not dehumanising, that's the reality of who's voting. You can't talk about interpreting online polls without acknowledging the data source and problems around it.

Your focus on bots isn't enough. Real people who haven't seen this have mobbed online votes because somebody else has told them to hate it.

How do you actually tune into people who actually watched it? How do you condition that data from the contaminated mess that it is to something has value to people who want an unbiased review?

There are some technical options, but even (eg) only allowing votes from people who used an Amazon account means cutting legitimate votes that saw it under another Amazon account, from an IMDB account, etc, etc. There is no perfect solution. What's best?

> Real people who haven't seen this have mobbed online votes because somebody else has told them to hate it.

As stated in another comment[1], Amazon already has the data on who has watched it and who hasn't. It's pretty clear that they're acting in bad faith by completely ignoring this data and removing all negative reviews, when they could have simply removed reviews from people who hadn't seen it.

> only allowing votes from people who used an Amazon account means cutting legitimate votes that saw it under another Amazon account, from an IMDB account, etc, etc. There is no perfect solution.

The solution above is more than good enough. The majority of people watch streaming content on their own accounts, and I'm willing to bet that that's also true for the vast majority (>95%) of watches. The solution above is more than adequate - the fact that Amazon isn't using it speaks to the fact that they don't actually care about the reviews being representative of what individuals thought when they watched it, they just want positive reviews.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32734997

Go to the IMDb login page on your phone. The choices of account are: IMDb, Amazon, Google, Apple.

So while we're betting, I would bet most new accounts fall into the last two. They offer zero-friction without another password to remember. Longstanding users have IMDb accounts that predate the Amazon takeover.

So I'm not so sure as you are that it's that simple. You're also limiting it to one vote a family.

So Amazon does have some data. They could probably infer some more from metadata. Perhaps those reviews should have remained, and if they wanted to do this in the future, a "verified purchaser" model might work Fairly-Enough™ but it still discounts many, probably most, fair reviews

I actually really liked it. Only a casual LOTR fan.

But yeah it’s 5-star from me so far, amazed to see it at 39% on Amazon.

People vexed they divert from the books I guess. Understandable but it’s a good show if that’s not your main concern.

Look at you, spinning the soft disinfo like a pro.

The negative reviews are from lotr fanatics.

The negative reviews are from people who dislike it deviating from the text.

> or "10/10 lol"

Oh don't worry. They are only removing the negative reviews.

I would like to see the criteria they are using to filter reviews. Are they removing disingenuous good reviews with equal force? Are they removing genuine, sincere, and insightful bad reviews?

>> ... by a bot, troll or other breed of digital goblin.

Ok, the goblin bit is cute though.

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