A movie that hasn't aired yet has 5.5 on IMDB out of 129k reviews
A movie about the Armenian Genocide, called The Promise, has received 129k reviews and the majority of them are negative.
With only 3 airings previously and an airing date today, this is clearly not right.
I hope this gets the attention of someone working on IMDB and sets this straight.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4776998/
27 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 76.6 ms ] thread"By the end of October 2016, before its official release and after only three pre-release screenings in September 2016 at the Toronto International Film Festival to small audiences, IMDb had registered over 86,000 ratings for the film. 55,126 of which were one-star and 30,639 of which were 10-star, with very few ratings falling anywhere in between. The majority of these votes had been cast by males outside of the US. By mid-November the total was over 91,000 votes, with over 57,000 one-star votes. Commentators assessed that these were mostly votes by people who had never seen the film, and that the one star voting was part of an orchestrated campaign by Armenian Genocide deniers to downrate the movie, which had then initiated an Armenian response to highly rate the movie."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Promise_(2016_film)#IMDb_p...
I'm not certain why so much Turkish identity is apparently tied up in denying the Armenian & Pontic Genocides. Just admit it happened and move on!
Many of the spam reviewers are still a Verified Purchase through Amazon and were just reimbursed after (it doesn't actually provide much benefit because VP is a poor proxy for legitimate customer). I always turn it off and wish they allowed making this the default.
There are too many products, office chairs are one example, where buying on Amazon is more expensive than buying elsewhere. So in this case the verified purchase reviews are not from the consumers that did the best research... not necessarily the people you want to give credit to. Ikea products on Amazon are another example.
Still Amazon reviews have de facto standardized as the central hub for product reviews on the web. I might never buy orange juice from Amazon when it's much easier and faster to grab at the grocery store, but before I plop down $8 for a jug of organic, all natural, etc from a brand I've never heard of, it's nice to be able to validate it a little bit.
If they expanded verified purchase to include other sources, eg uploading a receipt to prove verification, then this would change my stance. However, does that really align with their business?
I think verified watching is a similar circumstance.
Additionally, they might ignore all ratings from people who clearly submit fraudulent ratings.
It's not fool-proof, because you can still use throw-away accounts to nuke the ratings after release, but it would fix and discourage the most obvious fraud.
Sadly, the campaign is working. In a time where we are as interconnected as we are, a political film with tens of thousands of fake reviews should send out a huge red flag: someone doesn't want this movie to be seen. However the reality is that not many people are even aware there are so many fake reviews. The mainstream media is not covering this issue. IMDB has not responded. I'm not sure why this is, but can guess that it's related to the subject not being newsworthy & risk of harm with Turkish relations (i.e. why the U.S. refuses to officially acknowledge the genocide).
Many people are going to visit the ratings page before deciding to watch the film, and of those some will decide it's not worth their time because of the overwhelmingly negative score.
Turkish nationalism, of the genocidal ethnocentric variant, was a direct result of what Turkish leaders at the time personally experienced in the Balkans. The lesson learned was 100s of years of residence in a land didn't entitle you to anything. Just as Turkish reformists copied European concepts in warfare, education, parliamentary reform, they also copied population removal policies.
My only regret today is my ancestors didn't finish the job of population removal when they had the shot. Turkey would be that much closer to Caspian Sea access today.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think it's important for people to understand where others are coming from, and it doesn't seem like this particular point of view could be expressed in any form, no matter how polite, without being removed from this forum. I think that's unfortunate.
There's advocating genocide, and shooting people on sight in an older comment.
I understand you're not the person that killed the comment, but could the commenter have expressed either of those points of view in a way that wouldn't have resulted in them being removed? If not, I think that's unfortunate. We're adults here and should be able to handle genuine conversation on sensitive topics, I would hope.
So self-defense / death alone are not enough to flag a comment. Political movements like ELF (Earth Liberation Front) used arguments similar to mine on why, for example, coal plants are legitimate targets in self defense.
Valuing them above what? There are probably not very many people on this planet that can truly claim to value all human life equally and above everything else.
I can respect that HN isn't the place for this sort of discussion, but I do not accept that my comment was uncivil or inflammatory.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/chart/bottom