Slashdot Mirror
Gaming Netflix Ratings?
Nom du Keyboard writes "Not for the first time, I've noticed a new film that hasn't yet even reached the theaters, yet has hundreds of positive votes and/or reviews recorded on Netflix. This time the movie is Inkheart. For a movie that doesn't even hit the theaters until January 23, it already has 428 votes and a rating of 4.3 (out of 5) on Netflix. Seems more than a bit fraudulent to me. Also, it has a review that doesn't even review the movie, but instead says the books are great, therefore the movie should be too. Does the word 'shills' come to mind? With millions spent to promote a movie, are a few hundred of that going to phony voters? Or have that many people actually seen the film and just can't wait to rush home and log onto Netflix to vote? Just what is Netflix's responsibility here to provide honest ratings?"
But it isn't rare for there to be advanced screenings of a movie a week or two in advance of the public release date.
I wonder if we'll ever see movie cinemas with terminals or similar at them that let you rate a movie as you walk out after seeing it.
Maybe not released yet in the US, but there is a world beyond the US borders and the film has been released places there. It's actually quite a good film based on an interesting idea.
Wait. I must be lying because it isn't released yet... Or... Perhaps the world extends beyond American borders. What, Americans make up only 5% of the world population? (10% by body mass)
Deleted
kdawson is a drama queen.
Release:
Germany 11 December 2008
UK 12 December 2008
Brazil 25 December 2008
Iceland 26 December 2008
This happens everywhere. Why, even this very comment was modded to +2 before I even made it. You can't trust anyone these days.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
From IMDB:
Country - Date
Germany - 11 December 2008
UK - 12 December 2008
Brazil - 25 December 2008
Iceland - 26 December 2008
... or usenet or wherever todays kids get their moviez from...
Ebay used to be a decent place to get deals, then a few years ago the scammers found out they can fake feedback, and you ended up with 2000+ "transaction" power-sellers who will take your money and run faster than the nigerian prince.
Leave any negative feed back and it's "i've pleased all these guys, there's always one troll to screw it up"
If you browse around a while on sites like ebay and amazon you'll notice the patterns these people have, the same people giving feedback to each other, it's disgusting really, but any peer contributed system is subject to gaming via astroturfing.
Just see the net neutrality debate, or swiftboat.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
... like just about everything in life, from Amazon.com to Slashdot, caveat emptor.
As the MPAA often cites as one of their primary enemies, many movies get posted to P2P networks a noticeable amount of time before the official theater release. Then again, I wouldn't expect to that large an overlapping of frequent movie pirates and heavy Netflix users.
What is Slashdot's responsibility to provide honest moderation?
Both are just aggregates of random people who bothered to comment, and don't pretend to be anything more. If you want a "professional" movie rating, look at the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, where currently the Tomatometer for Inkheart is at 63%, based on 19 reviews.
Remember, however, that Netflix doesn't show you the rating of a movie; it shows you its best estimate of how well you will like the movie. And does a pretty good job of it, too, once you've rated a few hundred films. So there are a few problems with your reasoning, in addition to the painfully obvious "it's already been released elsewhere" point covered in previous comments:
- Is it even possible to make a shell account? Last I checked, you have to be logged in to rate anything on Netflix. And being logged in means you're a paying customer. I can't imagine paying $5 or whatever per single vote being cost effective, even at the cheapest service tier. Maybe there's a way if you abuse the free trial system, but that still strikes me as an awful lot of work.
- Say, for the sake of argument, that these ARE shill accounts. They signed up somehow, rated that one movie, and never did anything again. If they haven't rated any other movies on your list, Netflix's algorithm will have nothing to link it to your preferences. I.e. it won't affect the rating you see in the slightest.
- Let's even examine what happens if it's a multi-movie shill, perhaps kept up to vote highly for every movie released by a particular company. Again, the ranking system will almost certainly end up filtering out the result: unless you also happen to have given high scores to everything else that company has released, it's not likely to matter much in the final star value.
- Assuming that you're looking at the unweighted score - an inadvisable decision, given that the remarkably astute ranking system is the best part of Netflix - you have to account for the long-term balancing effects of opinionated Internet voters. See, for example, IMDB, where new movies often peak onto the top 250 only to be struck down by Godfather/Shawshank/etc. fans. If someone only sort of likes a movie that's unrated, they might give it a 3, whereas showing up to see it rated 5 is going to result in a 1 and possible an irate comment. The flock will detect the wolf in their midst soon enough and crush it.
- Who the fuck uses Netflix to get ratings for unreleased movies?
On a tangentially related note, I first read that title and thought we were going to see a Netflix-like weighted rating system for games. I'd kill for a way to heavily weight lovers of Dwarf Fortress while throwing out comments from Halo junkies when deciding what to play next.
Check out over two thirds of the listings on any 'odd jobs' website.
This sort of work under the name "writing" makes up the majority of what gets advertised.
Between those and the "Copy a Website in its Entirety" jobs there's barely any room left for the "scan and send magazines on the night they're released" work.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
You don't have to be a Shil to post reviews before the movie is out, you just have to be a fanboy. The 'I read the books' comment is definitely by a fanboy.
I used to see a lot of this crap on EBGames.com before they got smart and disabled reviews before the games came out. Now it's called 'Preview Buzz'. You see the exact same comments, but they don't get to provide a rating.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I have to wait till the DVD gets out as I didnt find the time to watch while the movie WAS out at the cinemas.
bickerdyke
Wow Australia 2nd April, we speak english here. What justification can they possibly have for a 5 month fucking gap in the release?
And they wonder why Aussies "pirate" so much.
Getting a link to a movie on Slashdot. How much did they pay you for that?
Seriously, even if the movie hadn't been released anywhere, there are still plenty of opportunities to see it. Producers hold previews all the time, and it wouldn't surprise me if they modernized things by encouraging those previewers to post their comments right at the theatre lobby.
This happens on Amazon.Com quite often, with products that are not yet released. Do I consider it fraud? Not necessarily. Once the masses weigh in, the law of averages will too.
-David
I had thought Netflix was a US only service. 400+ reviews for a film that's only been released overseas seems quite a lot - I guess Governor Palin has reignited the legendary American love of travel and curiosity about foreign countries.
Inkheart is in the theatres here in Brasil for the last three weeks.
Maybe it just didn't hit the theatres in the OP's city/state/country??
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I gamed the rating of a movie on Netflix, just for kicks. King Kung Fu had a pretty low rating, mostly contributions of 1 star from a number of reviewers. So, to get a feel for the size of the denominator, I had about 6 or 7 friends rate it five star. Sure enough, it was enough to boost it a five tenths of a point.
Is the film any good? I dunno. It's 71 in my queue though.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
it's the date thing mate it said 4/12 on the American box, so they though April... that's all, they don't know we write our days and months backwards!
<sarcasm>
I agree - but clearly that is not sufficient.
They are also encouraging these shenanigans by even linking to critic's external reviews, which are often posted BEFORE the movie can be seen by their customers. Sometimes even before it gets to the theaters!
That sort of irresponsability should stop: Netflix is a DVD rental company. It obviously should not link to reviews / opinions from people who have not seen the movie on an officially released DVD.
For that matter, how dare they NOT block user reviews altogether for pending DVD releases? Who could possibly give an honest opinion about the Dexter: Season 3 DVDs when they have not been released, queued and shipped by Netflix?
That's obviously a FRAUD, and Netflix should block voting from anyone who has even seen a movie or a TV show from any media source that is not Netflix.
</sarcasm>
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
My preferences are set to filter anyone below 1, but I still see all the garbage that the trolls are working so hard to post.
I don't see why this should be happening now, I used to be able to not see any of it, but with this new interface it seems its impossible to escape reading the first line of the troll posts.
It needs fixing.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I teach 5th grade, and many of my students have read and enjoyed these books. I'll bet most of the reviews are kids who liked the books, and don't really think or care yet about whether the book does justice to the movie, if the movie is any good, if Slashdotters think that their rating is fair. They're ten... and they know how to use a mouse.
And really, do you take any kind of online polling seriously?
The headline meant netflix style rating for games. I was thinking "yes please". I'm sick of sites that seem to rank on a bell curve 1 through 5 where everything is a 3 (or a 7). Anyone know of any sites that will take your personal rankings (like netflix) and correlate it to others rankings and recommend games? Yes I know this is offtopic.. just trolling for a reccomendation.
Saw it at my local Cineworld. I thought it was a good film, enjoyable, creative and a great villian in Andy Serkis.
I'd say it's certainly worth at least 4 out of 5. Infinately better than bedtime stories (which has a different twist on the same concept). It's been largely been ignored over here though which is a shame. Got almost no marketing.
I don't know how people can ever come to any conclusions. It's cases like this (original post and response) that make me question how anybody can reach any sort of authoritative conclusion. You think you've identified something, and something you never thought of blows it away. Maybe this seems trivial in this case, it's easy for Americans to forget about the rest of the world, or, more likely, not realize how different it is and runs on a different schedule, or realize that something (like Netflix) is global. But it seems to me like this kind of shortsightedness is much more diverse and often more inconspicuous than just forgetting about the rest of the world. Maybe that's an indication that people shouldn't hold conclusions with such authority? It points out a fatal flaw in that statement by Sherlock Holmes, something like, "If you've eliminated all other possibilities, all that remains, however improbable, must be the truth." There's no way to can enumerate all other possibilities, let alone eliminate them. "Oh, well, it didn't occur to me that an indestructible micrometeorite would have been landing at this point in time appearing very much like a bullet permeating this guy's skull! Maybe we shouldn't have executed the convict after all."
Then again, should we really be surprised to see this happen, with interviews for upcoming releases taking the form of "this will be the greatest thing EVER!" for absolutely any game or movie that comes out, especially those that turn out to be complete garbage? Don't believe the hype machine, folks, is what I'm saying.
...that everything on a retailer's site is advertsing? Is it that hard to find sites that rate stuff but don't sell it?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Also, it has a review that doesn't even review the movie, but instead says the books are great therefore the movie should be too. Does the word 'shills' come to mind?
Actually, the word "fanboys" comes to mind. For any given fictional franchise, there will inevitably be enough people floating around the Internet who care so much about the movie being good that (in their minds) it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's a North America based company, thus it should not allow voting until the film is out in North America.
So you're saying we need to make sure that geographic limitations remain in force even in a medium where they are totally irrelevant? That kind of wastes some of the potential of the ol' information superhighway there, doesn't it?
While fraud may be a problem, I don't think it is. Pre-screeners get a copy of the films just for these sorts of things.
I know for a fact that if you look for it, you can get "Taken," "Defiance," and other movies on the internet in DVD quality over the internet "for free." I am further certain that members film community and/or MPIAA uploaded the movies to drive up viewership at the box office.
For instance, "The Day The Earth Stood Still" sucked, so the "screening" video is not out there. "Gran Torino" was an excellent movie and did well at the box office, and the screening video *is* out there.
My new criteria for seeing a movie in a theater is looking for the screening video on-line. If it is out there, its probably a good movie because someone put it out there.
I remember when "Dark Knight" was at the number 1 spot up against godfather and shawshank
Thankfully someone has fixed that, but it just shows how inaccurate internet polls are.
"indicates the depths to which our great nation has sunk to."
should be
"indicates the depths to which our great nation has sunk."
Also, fallen would have been a better word to use instead of sunk.
Sheesh, if you're going to troll, at least do so with some grammatical sense.
Apparently the more the local distributors pay, the earlier they can show it. The Australian distributors obviously don't think anyone is going to watch it (Is Brendan Fraser relatively unpopular there or something?)
Seriously - even if they have to dub it, that's probably only a couple of weeks' work for a handful of voice actors and it's not like each country needs to book time in the same audio studio.
It's easy to get a high positive ebay score if you have a legit business that doesn't depend on reputation, like selling LED replacement bulbs for cars or something like that. The penalty for failure is low so people will buy from you anyway, and items are cheap so you have high volume and get a high score. The eBay score doesn't really tell you much on their own if they have 1 negative and 2000 positives, and the negative is for a thousand dollar item, and everything else was a buck, either.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Somewhat, but it doesn't mean we should prevent reviews/analyses being up at Wikipedia, just that maybe Netflix would realize that 99.5% of THEIR site's reviews that are out before the movie are going to be lies and astroturfing.
Preventing likely fake reviews would make them more useful for customers.
Why not go by something like Rotten Tomatoes and word of mouth from friends? I've never really placed much stock in reviews on any site that is also "selling" me stuff at the same time, whether it's Netflix, Amazon, even Newegg sometimes.
It's probably crap. Just listen to the people on line at Blockbuster if you doubt this.
You mean the rest of us write the date correctly - in order of significance
dd/mm/yy
smallest/smaller/biggest
But are the others some part of a movie producer conspiracy to artificially hype the movie?
Insufficient evidence, perhaps. But "insufficient evidence" doesn't mean "of course not". There's insufficient evidence either way.
I pay people to leave me comments on Myspace to make it seem like I have friends, does that make me a "Shiller"?
Go on Amazon sometime and look at DVD ratings. People write "this was an awesome book!!!1!"
Of course, people also rate something with a zero because the book arrived damaged or their marketplace seller send them an Acceptable copy when they ordered a Like New ("I'm so mad about this poor customer service I want to rate this a zero but Amazon only lets me rate it a one!" Note that there's an entirely separate rating system for sellers and customer service.)
Look at Yahoo's movie reviews...people write reviews before the movie comes out ("I can't wait to see this! I loved the book! I give it an A+!")
And of course there are people who'll rate something as one star because their kid sister likes it and it makes them mad, or rate it five stars because they have a crush on a particular star, or have some strange "I rate everything I look at as one star - to hell with 'em!" mindset, or whatever.
Stupidity is a lot easier to prove.
Advice: on VPS providers
Plenty of people are able to find the movies on torrent sites and see it before it's theatrical release. Of course that leaves Netflix with a moral dilemma: Do they let people leave reviews knowing that they saw it illegally? (well not illegal, but you know what I mean)
For example, horror movie website, bloody-disgusting.com has recently disabled the user review area for movies that have not been released yet. One example is "Let the Right One In", where many users were able to get some glowing reviews in before the mods could turn off access.
If I were someone in a position of authority at Netflix, here is how I would handle it.
When you rent a movie, Netflix has record that you rented it.
Don't allow anyone to review a movie that hasn't first rented it from Netflix!
This will shut out people who have seen it in the theaters, of course, as well as pirates. But it will also make it a lot harder to shill without first renting the movie.
But no matter how many times you rent it, your account only gets to review a movie once.
Fresh on the heels of the story of the individual from Belkin, does it surprise you that the online review fiasco delves into other industries?
Big producers such as Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, and others probably have thousands of employees in their marketing departments, and it would not surprise me in the least that part of their job is to go online and give positive reviews to thier films (and maybe negative reviews to competitor's films).
Personally I don't give much credence to any online review of product simply because the results are uncontrolled, I don't know the people giving the reviews, and there is no way of knowing whether they are competent or not (not to mention completely bogus).
...by stupidity.
I think Hanlon's Razor applies here. Many people here on Slashdot like to put on a tinfoil hat and shout "AstroTurfing" for almost anything. I'm harder to convince of that.
I'll put aside what many have pointed out here, that the film in question has already been released in places.
NPR had an interview a month or so ago with David Edelstein, a film critic who happened to be the first to go public with a negative review for Dark Knight. In other words, he was the one responsible for first knocking it down from a 100% rating on metacritic and similar meta-rating sites.
In the interview he said he regretted having been first because of the backlash he received, but that he stood by his rating.
He also went on to point out the deluge of emails he received from angry fans. Many of whom would go on to criticize him at length while prefacing the email with "I haven't actually seen the film yet, but..."
Fanboys are rabid. They defend movies, hardware, software, etc, often sight unseen, because they want their horse to win. Even if they don't actually know what it looks like.
In this case, the movie is based on a book. I don't doubt that many of the votes on NetFlix are folks who have rated the film sight unseen, because they WANT to like it. They're jazzed about it, and they want it to be rated highly.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
That is the worst way to write dates. You can't tell 2010 and 1910 apart, and if you try to sort a bunch of files named by date, in your scheme the dates are all mixed up.
You want big-endian, and 4 digit years:
YYYY/MM/DD.
The ISO agrees
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
What is your complaint or concern with using Newegg or Netflix for ratings? Both of them sell multiple similar products, so artificially increasing the rating of a specific product has almost no utility to them. There are many other choices. What's more, you have already paid your dues to Netflix, so they have no incentive whatsoever to encourage you to rent another movie from them. Additionally it decreases the utility of their rating system, and perhaps their whole service, if they have disappointed customers that feel betrayed by the rating they read.
In addition to the fact that the specific film mention is already released in other countries, I think it would be much more likely that fans are the ones rating the films than it is that the film companies are doing it. If the film is based on a book, a play, or a remake, it already has a built in audience who will be fanatical about it and if it stars a famous actor then there will almost certainly be a group of people who will give a movie 5 stars site unseen because they love that actor so much.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Aside from both being incredibly dishonest, I see little connection between the net neutrality debate and swiftboating. They both involve making shit up, but that's about it. You don't have to look far to find examples of people making shit up in the US. It's legal, too. For example, see any Mickey D's television ads where the burgers look hot and fresh. The vast majority of advertising in this country walks the fine line between puffery and outright deception.
The eBay score doesn't really tell you much on their own if they have 1 negative and 2000 positives, and the negative is for a thousand dollar item, and everything else was a buck, either.
But that does tell you a lot. If you look at the items sold for the first page or two of feedback you can see exactly that kind of thing going on, and adjust the bidding acordingly.
There are issues with eBay feedback but it's still the best system going in a world full of people with shifty motives for online sales.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ebay used to be a decent place to get deals, then a few years ago the scammers found out they can fake feedback, and you ended up with 2000+ "transaction" power-sellers who will take your money and run faster than the nigerian prince.
I don't see how that can work, since it costs money (paid to eBay) to list items and have them sold. I've had good luck with powersellers and eBay in general. Of course I wouldn't buy a big ticket item if all the positive reviews were for small priced items.
Probably most everybody knows about this site by now, but Toolhaus's Negative/Neutral Feedback is indispensable if you're still on eBay. Any volume seller will have problem customers, but at least you can tell if the problems are consistent.
Haida Manga
> Also, it has a review that doesn't even review the movie, but instead says the books are great, therefore the movie should be too.
Right, because there's never been a crappy movie made from a good book.
And Brenden Fraiser has never made a crappy movie, so it has to be good!
And I'm the tooth fairy! So floss every day or I won't bring you any candy!
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So a site that allows posted feedback from any customer at all has less than perfect entries? The deuce you say! Next you'll be telling me that letters to the editor in the local paper might contain logical fallacies in their political arguments. No, I can't accept this! Such a chaotic world cannot be true! It's the devil's work!
The eBay score doesn't really tell you much on their own if they have 1 negative and 2000 positives, and the negative is for a thousand dollar item, and everything else was a buck, either.
Netflix had a contest for a "recommendation algorithm", can you image EBay having a "karma algorithm" contest? EBay is paralyzed because it might jeopardize profits. Netflix doesn't have that luxury due to all the companies trying to create/control content delivery.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
The GP didn't say liking things is idiotic, he said that voting on a movie before actually seeing it is idiotic, regardless of whether you're familiar with the underlying story.
And yes, voting based on invalid data is stupid. Well, stupid or deceitful, but people are generally more in the former category.
Case in point: Catwoman. Anyone who would "pre-rate" this movie 5 stars because they're fans of the Batman universe and love Halle Berry is categorically stupid.
Really? You are honestly trying to claim that it isn't stupid to rate a movie as being good even when you have not seen it? Really?
They're just trying to make the world a stranger place, that's all.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
There's quite a few video games I like. Should I vote their corresponding movies up even if Uwe Boll directs? That's idiotic. Love an actor. Love the book, video game, or writer that inspired the movie script. But don't vote a movie just based on that. It really shows ignorance.
> "indicates the depths to which our great nation has sunk to." One of the two 'to's is redundant. How do you expect people to take you seriously with such shit grammar?
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
Sounds a lot more like rabid fans than actual shills. One fan mailing list could easily account for the observation. Is it actually news to anybody that fans of stuff will go and encourage other people to check out the thing they are a fan of, without waiting to really review the new thing objectively?
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
Remember that people that work in the movie industry will get free screeners or other promotional chances to view a movie before it comes out in the U.S.
Also, 428 ratings on Netflix is likely to correspond to much more than 428/# subscribers-percentage of people that have already seen it, because many people don't rate.
On Netflix, I'm not surprised to see thousands to ratings on some titles before they come out in the U.S. Usually the low hundreds pre-release indicates a smaller audience when it does come out.
Netflix is not a movie review site intended to help you decide what movie to see in the theater. There are plenty of those. But Netflix is a movie rental site. The reviews are there to help people decide what movies to order. By time a movie is actually available on Netflix, the handful of pre-release reviews will be swamped by many more reviews from people who saw the movie during its theatrical release. So it doesn't really matter to anybody whether those early bird reviews are from people who happened to get an advance screening (of which there are often quite a few) or from enthusiasts who are reviewing how much they expect to like the movie.
Some directors/producers love to test movies. They'll test a whole film, or just a particular scene, many times. They have an audience watch it and see how they react. The movie will often have been done over in a number of versions before it ever gets finalized. Others don't do that, they make it and it's done, but even then eairly copies almost always go out for review and there are some preview screenings.
What, Americans make up only 5% of the world population? (10% by body mass)
Yes, but if we don't like something, it suffers because we are the consumers of the world's resources. If it's not good enough for me to buy with my borrowed money off of my maxed-out credit cards, then it's not good enough for anyone else.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
Inkheart premiered in Berlin on December 6th.
At least no one has spammed "Row Row Fight the Power" yet.
WOW! after reading that you remind me of that wacky-ass brown-haired girl on that documentary...."Jesus Camp."
BTW, WTF does this have to do with Netflix ratings? Sounds to me like you like to hear the keyboard click, or you like to masturbate to the reading aloud of your finished post. Either way, you need help.
"That's right...I said it."
Really? You are honestly trying to claim that it isn't stupid to rate a movie as being good even when you have not seen it? Really?
You only think about it from the aspect of the person READING the review. For you, such a rating is useless and thus (to you) appears stupid.
But for the writer, the review is motivated not by stupidity but (most likely) by loyalty to a writer and character(s) they love. Again, the true fault is with misinformation, not with the intelligence of the reviewer, who we already know to be an avid reader.
Think about it - are you REALLY claiming that all these people writing reviews are honest to god idiots who cannot actually function in life? Really?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There's quite a few video games I like. Should I vote their corresponding movies up even if Uwe Boll directs?
That would be annoying, but not stupid. My whole point. I'm not claiming what the people are doing is right, it's just not done from true stupidity.
It's not like they strapped jet engines to the back of a car and took in into the desert to test.
It's not like they are jumping off cliffs with body suits they have never trained in.
What they ARE in fact doing is promoting a movie based on a book they love, in hopes that the movie will do well as a kind of reward to the author and a story they love.
That motive is not stupid, even if the data provided does not agree with you. You and they have different purposes is all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All I have to say is Epic Movie's IMDB rating was 8.4 days after it came out. Now it's like 2.2. Someone even posted on the forum for that movie that there's a glitch where if you delete your 1 star vote, it registers as a 0. Obviously that was a lie to get people to stop rating it 1 star. Why would someone say that unless they worked for the movie company directly? It's absolutely proven that it happens and site owners are doing nothing to stop it.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Who mentioned anything about file names?
Learn to read, please. What grandparent poster said was that it was retarded to rate something that they haven't seen, based on the assumption that they would like it given who's in it. Believe it or not, even fanboys can find out the hard way that their favorite actor/actress has, for the first time, decided to act in a bomb. And yes, that applies to people who've already read the book.
How can he say that it's stupid to like something? Well, when it's something you cannot possibly know whether you like without being psychic...
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Yes, it is. Highest order bits first.