The irony is that they wanted to bury the movie on imdb, but they did such a good job that it is becoming a famous case study.
The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
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Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#12Who would pay attention to ratings from a single unreliable source. For me the best place are meta sites that gather from many related sizes.
I prefer the IMdB's ratings system over, say, meta-site Rotten Tomatoes.
At Rotten Tomatoes they rated Seth Rogen-vehicle "Neighbors" as 100%, last I checked. Meaning only: no reviewer at that point had said it was awful. And yet, I saw it and it was awful.
At IMdB, I can see that it rates as 7.6/10.0, and also that teenager voters loved it (9.0/10.0), where older viewers hated it (5.0/10.0). Far more useful information.
Gunday (the film of the parent article) gets fairer treatment from the IMdB's top 1000 users, who rate it 4.9/10.0
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#13Luckily, IMDB also shows Metacritic ratings next to their own user ratings. I take those into account before I make my decisions on what I'm going to rent/stream. Far too often do you find a movie (usually a somewhat recent release) that's just flat out terrible despite having a > 7 score on IMDB (and usually a Metacritic score in the 30's or 40's)
Do you have any interesting examples that you've found?
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#14Maybe a solution could be weighting the vote according to the user history: a user leaving a single vote on a single movie shouldn't be as influential as an user that voted on a wider range of movies over time
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#15For more information on the war, read the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_War_of_1971
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#16The irony is that they wanted to bury the movie on imdb, but they did such a good job that it is becoming a famous case study.
I don't think they wanted to bury the movie. I think they wanted a mass showing of anger to demonstrate their power, to themselves and others. They want people to know who's doing it and why.
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#17It's not that the rating is inaccurate... it's that a huge population of people that don't usually rate movies on IMDB has suddenly entered the rating pool. Maybe the solution is to have country-specific ratings, so that my ratings are averaged with the ratings of my peers, rather than the ratings of people in entirely different cultures.
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#18Bollywood movies are kitsch. Generally they don't deserve any rating.
Stereotypical guesses are the last thing I would like to see on Hacker News. There are good as well as bad movies all over the world.
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#19Very interesting -- a lesson for IMDB to filter votes that fall outside normal distribution ranges.
A lesson for any site which allows voting. Participatory sites, regardless of size, are subject to turfing or the like. Some handle it better than others, some don't. The worst don't when the results favor their own ideology.
Well, interestingly, the problem here isn't quite that people are giving the movie false reviews. They might genuinely hate when this sort of thing happens -- bitter fights over terminology aren't particularly rare. The "problem" here is that they care more about the movie than do the general population of movie-watchers; if everyone on earth had to watch Gunday and rate it on imdb, all of these people might honestly rate it 1, but they would all be swamped by reviews from people who thought it was decent (and that group would likely be swamped by other 1-star reviews from people who didn't speak the language, but try not to focus on them).
It's similar to the problem of an author's "best" or most notable works getting lower crowd-sourced reviews than their average work. What happens there is that generally people only bother to read, and subsequently review, books that they think there's a good chance they'll like. If you're a mediocre author putting out filler in your genre, your 6th, average, book will get pretty good reviews because everyone who bought it knew what they were getting. If your 7th book happens to be excellent, hype will induce a lot of people who don't like your genre to buy it and see what everyone's talking about -- and they'll take it out on you in their reviews afterwards.
Re: The Story Behind the Worst Movie on IMDb
#20Barbra Streisand is in it.