There's the dehumanizing language I'm talking about. By all means delete the actual bot reviews, but that's not what Amazon did. They removed all the bad reviews, and their sycophants online use dehumanizing language to justify it.
That's not dehumanising, that's the reality of who's voting. You can't talk about interpreting online polls without acknowledging the data source and problems around it.
Your focus on bots isn't enough. Real people who haven't seen this have mobbed online votes because somebody else has told them to hate it.
How do you actually tune into people who actually watched it? How do you condition that data from the contaminated mess that it is to something has value to people who want an unbiased review?
There are some technical options, but even (eg) only allowing votes from people who used an Amazon account means cutting legitimate votes that saw it under another Amazon account, from an IMDB account, etc, etc. There is no perfect solution. What's best?
> Real people who haven't seen this have mobbed online votes because somebody else has told them to hate it.
As stated in another comment[1], Amazon already has the data on who has watched it and who hasn't. It's pretty clear that they're acting in bad faith by completely ignoring this data and removing all negative reviews, when they could have simply removed reviews from people who hadn't seen it.
> only allowing votes from people who used an Amazon account means cutting legitimate votes that saw it under another Amazon account, from an IMDB account, etc, etc. There is no perfect solution.
The solution above is more than good enough. The majority of people watch streaming content on their own accounts, and I'm willing to bet that that's also true for the vast majority (>95%) of watches. The solution above is more than adequate - the fact that Amazon isn't using it speaks to the fact that they don't actually care about the reviews being representative of what individuals thought when they watched it, they just want positive reviews.
Go to the IMDb login page on your phone. The choices of account are: IMDb, Amazon, Google, Apple.
So while we're betting, I would bet most new accounts fall into the last two. They offer zero-friction without another password to remember. Longstanding users have IMDb accounts that predate the Amazon takeover.
So I'm not so sure as you are that it's that simple. You're also limiting it to one vote a family.
So Amazon does have some data. They could probably infer some more from metadata. Perhaps those reviews should have remained, and if they wanted to do this in the future, a "verified purchaser" model might work Fairly-Enough™ but it still discounts many, probably most, fair reviews
There's the dehumanizing language I'm talking about. By all means delete the actual bot reviews, but that's not what Amazon did. They removed all the bad reviews, and their sycophants online use dehumanizing language to justify it.