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ajrob

6 Messages

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212 Points

Mon, Sep 23, 2019 3:32 AM

Why so many 10/10 reviews from fresh accounts?

I've noticed this before, but it is becoming a huge problem. A new TV show I was looking at on IMDb is getting overwhelmingly negative ratings and reviews (4/10) but there is a crazy amount of 10/10 reviews from fresh accounts that registered the same day and it's the only review they've ever made. It's not just one or two of them either, every single 10/10 review I checked was made by a fresh account. There may be no legitimate 10/10 reviews at all.

On the other hand, the real reviews are coming from accounts that are 5-10 years old and have many reviews under their name.

Without these most likely fake 10s, the real rating would be closer to 2/10.

This seems like obvious manipulation by the TV network itself, or possibly just overly-emotional fans of that TV show. Either way, something should be done about it.

Perhaps there could be a warning flag that says something like "IMDb has detected a large number of potentially fake reviews." - The gaming website/app Steam has setup a similar warning system to alert people about rigged votes.

Or just flag the reviews individually so we can quickly see who just made an account today to review it.

Question

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Updated 

a year ago

11

2

Responses

bderoes

Champion

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3.6K Messages

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104.3K Points

a year ago

AJrob,
I agree with your idea of marking reviews as being from New Members. Perhaps just listing each person's Join Date, and color the date green for newbies. Perhaps also a count of their ratings and a count of their reviews. (Perhaps those things could pop-up when you mouseover the user id.)

I'd also like to see a histogram of the reviews' ratings at the head/right column of the Reviews page.
And a repeat of the average rating, rating count, and link to the demographics page (like the one below.)

Notice, though, that the average IMDb Rating for A Little Late with Lilly Singh (TV Series) is 4.1, (The rating Vote does not require a Review to accompany it. There are 615 Ratings and only 98 Reviews.) Also notice that the arithmetic mean of the Ratings is 6.6. So IMDb is already disregarding many new/suspicious members when computing the average rating it displays on the title page.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10023178/ratings

1

ajrob

6 Messages

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212 Points

That sounds great. The join date, review count and color coding would make it so much easier, and it seems like such a simple thing to add.

I know the IMDb system already factors in suspicious ratings, and it changes the big number we see at the top, but it does nothing for me when I'm reading reviews. It's just telling me, "Here are all of the reviews - half of them are probably fake and we factored that in to the average, but we won't even give you a hint on which reviews to skip."

Like

a year ago

0

braeden_orr

9 Messages

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502 Points

a year ago

I believe Lilly Singh is a popular YouTuber. More than likely it is her fanbase leaving the reviews than cast/crew. Which of course leads to the dilemma of if these are true reviews are not. Because if a fan makes an account so they can give their favorite personality a good review, that’s still a legitimate review and I imagine it would be very hard to tell what are fans making accounts to leave a review vs. a coordinated effort to inflate the ratings.

2

ajrob

6 Messages

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212 Points

Yes, she is. I have no problem with a fan creating a new account to rate/review and I understand it's difficult to be sure which reviews are real. I'm not calling for deleting reviews just yet though.

They may just have to deal with having their review flagged as suspicious for a while... and perhaps the flag could be lifted if they rate/review a few more titles in the following weeks. People could still bypass this, but at least they would have to put in more than 5 minutes of effort.

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a year ago

0

marco

1.8K Messages

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60.7K Points

if a fan makes an account so they can give their favorite personality a good review, that’s still a legitimate review

You can't give people a review on IMDb, only titles. If a fan makes an account to give their favorite personality a good review and does this via a title that that personality is in without having watched the title in question, it is not a legitimate review. But of course, that's near impossible to prove.

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a year ago

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