adjusting movies rating to give users a real feedback

I'm pretty sure this comes up quite often. But I did go through ALL the rating's FAQ, and after all, it sums up to this: Some movies rating (the recent, high budget ones) are systematically faked, and it shows.


Let's take a practical example: the last avengers movie. I decided to Watch it because ratings on the site were 9/10. I watched it, and couldn't believe this thing had such high value in the eyes of so many.

So I went to do some checking and maths on the ratings and comments. I don't say I went through all of them, there were too many, but i did read a lot, and even combed them through the filters of pertinence, time posted, and stars awarded, to make sure I didn't miss anything of importance.

Without bothering you, dear reader, with boring numbers, I'm just going to say this: when i look at the 9/10 and 10/10 given before may, 1st, they are all explained with "generic superlatives". None of those actually speaks about the movie, they just say how beautiful and life-changing an experience it was, to Watch. And most of those actually commented on one to three movies at all, and were accounts created in the last five years. After that date, these kind of rating start to answer to previous lower-rated opinions, but none of them actually gives an opinion on the stuff that happens in the movie.


when looking at 5 to 7 rated comments, they all say how the movie was flawed, generally evoking specific issues, and making the part of what was good, and what was bad, and pretty much all agree that it was deceptive - they were expecting better. Many of these have actually a few reviews written for other movies, and are of various "server age".

When looking at 1 to 4 rated comments, they generally say either that they hated it, or that it would deserve a better rating, but are trying to bring down the general that is too high and obviously inflated. I didn't look a lot into these profiles, but I'm among the formers, in these, having rated this movie a 3* because it was really disappointing and badly executed, in my opinion.

now, add to this a semantic analysis of the sentences, and the fact that some reviews get 2000+ "useful" votes in less than 2 weeks (as comparison, mine had 5 out of 7 :D ), and it becomes obvious that the movie's average rating was boosted with semi-automatic tools.


Here is how i see it: Year X, people or bots creates accounts that will be used at some point a few years later. Accounts are almost dormant, and have little to no activity. Then when a movie comes out, during year X+(3-5), somebody pay for those people to return to said accounts (eventually through a bot) and fill some random comments that could actually apply to pretty much any movie. At the same time, the accounts vote each other in term of usefulness, all to get some credit to the evaluation.

For the duration of the contract, whenever the general rating drops below a given value, some new comments are randomly generated to reestablish the "proper" value.

I took the example of a recent movie, but actually this can be easily seen when making a statistical check on older blockbusters: systematically, there is a huge wave of "good" ratings at the moment the movies go to theatre, and then, a few months later, a systematic drop of several points, given by the successive comments that real spectators wrote.

The problem in all this: ratings are no longer trustables. For me, I can't say if i would have watched this movie if ratings had been 6 instead of 10. But it's possible that I would have chosen a different one, and waited for this to get on VOD, for example.

It would be easy to create a "trusted group" system, where users can actually be selected for their objectivity, and make a "parallel" rating system. The first, open to all, as it is today; the second, only to those people that actually identified themselves, filled a small questionnaire, and are rated themselves on their comments, so as to make sure they aren't fakes. Or something else like that. In all cases, something should be done to make sure the rating service becomes useful once again.

sorry for the long text.