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To what extent, if any, are living breathing humans involved in reviewing IMDB reviews?
Excuse me, dear robot god, if I have posted this in the wrong place. I can't find any descriptor , and don't want to devote hours to reading thousands of "FAQ" posts. But that's the point. I have been occasionally posting my amateur reviews here on IMDB for a few years, and have created an odd anthology of something less then 500 vaguely diaristic impressions. Since bizarrely, IMDB puts new posts at the bottom of the pile, there is almost no chance anyone will read them; they belong at the top of the list, so it's more of a notepad for me, and I get no feedback, even though that would be limited to an up or down vote. Of late perhaps half of what I write gets posted. Do breathing humans read these things? I mean the censors and arbiters of taste that vet "submissions"...Ever? I can't decipher what passes algorithmic muster around here. What do the robots like? I'll sometimes test submit two or three versions of the same review. It isn't necessarily the most tepid offering that makes it, something omitting all references to other films, or people, something that offers no opinion on a person or style that could be called qualitative, something that a psychotically prudish sensibility would find boring....yet containing plenty of relevant comments on "structure".....and that gets banned; but another post deliberately vulgar and loaded with inference, or bald and rude opinions on something or someone I call ugly and stupid and miscast...gets accepted. My father, in one of his pithier moments, told me that so and so wouldn't say s**t if she had a mouthful...but he was referring to a person...not software. Apparently if the computer doesn't like how you use an adverb, or a preposition, or say "then" when it should be 'than"...maybe I capitalize something it doesn't like, I'll never know how I sinned, it just won't get posted. I think about Mark Twain writing Huck Finn. He explains in a prologue that at least 5 regional dialects are being used, all kinds of idiosyncratic formulations....Mark Twain would have had every sentence rejected by IMDB, odd conjugations or an improperly applied pluperfect... And what if a movie is very specifically about a loaded issue, race being an obvious example, it doesn't matter if every other word in the movie carries a "socially negative" charge, one doesn't dare quote or paraphrase; and a metaphrase would carry a death sentence. The most benign morpheme can get you banned. And the rules; no vulgarity, stay conceptually on point, etc. are meaningless criteria. This comment will likely get deleted. Oh well.


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