[lemonad]

Wikipedia has some more information on the issue:

"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...

[zeveb]

Reminds me of Serdar Argic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic), an Armenian-Genocide denier who ruined USENET for quite some time.

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!

[rommelsLegacy]

The problem is a weird type of nationalism, that not only does not allow them to see over their own biases, but it kinda goes like this Turkey>Islam>Rest, and you can't be a good Turk if you don't slam all your enemies 24/7 :)

[matthewbauer]

I wonder what the best solution to this is? Amazon has "Verified Purchase" on reviews that ensure the person at least has bought the thing they are reviewing. I could see a system that is "Verified Watching" which confirms the person has watched the thing all the way through. This would be easier to implement on something like Netflix where that data is already available, but you could probably work some verification process through third parties with IMDB. Of course, this wouldn't stop people from just sitting through a showing and manipulating the votes but it certainly makes it harder.

[tedmiston]

Personally I think Verified Purchase on Amazon does more harm than good.

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.

[mcv]

A simple fix I'm thinking about would be IMDB simply ignoring all the pre-release ratings once the film has been released and received a number of more reliable ratings.

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.