Food, Inc: Rotten Tomatoes "approved reviewers" give it 96%. "User votes" only 80%. IMDB only 79%. Why the discrepancy? I just watched this movie, it's certainly not a 76% movie. Heck, it changed my life.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/food_inc/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/
If enough people really hated this movie to give it 79%, surely there must be criticism. I looked - oddly, this movie is very loved. Furthermore, why the rotten tomatoes discrepancy? Are the approved reviewers so out of touch with what people really like? I would expect to see a close match.
Case in point. Saving private ryan is a 92%/93%. Almost a perfect match, as expected:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/saving_private_ryan/
So, I have another theory. The China SEO. Ask yourself this:
If you're an international, multi billion dollar food mega corp who largely depends on your reputation, and a very edgy documentary is released that has the potential to adversely affect your business, would you want to prevent this from being seen? Of course. Oh, this conspiracy is so deep an obvious now.
SEO companies, or "Search Engine Optimization" firms (many operate out of China and India) are basically spammers. Here's how it works:
You have a car dealership. You hire an SEO, pay them, say $20,000 and they magically drive traffic to your site. You suddenly have 30 five star reviews on Google Maps and Yelp. Business booms. What's happening is somewhere in India there are 100 poorly paid employees surfing the web, posting positive reviews about your US business on google local reviews, posting on forums, doing anything they can to make your business appear better than it actually is.
You can't just post these reviews yourself - that would require 30 fake accounts. Fake accounts are easy to spot, the SEO's know that. These people make a living out of fooling spam detection. They're smarter than that. Their accounts look real, because, they sort of are.
Now I wonder - IMDB is a nonprofit. Do they really have engineering staff to fight against sophisticated SEO's to prevent paid-for reviews from going through? Google is a $350 BILLION DOLLAR company with arguably 15,000 of the smartest software engineers in the world working on this problem, and it's a tough battle for them. There's no way IMDB can even remotely think about blocking SEOs.
To date, 17,239 reviewed the movie. If 1000 1.0/10.0 reviews come in, the score drops from 8.0 to to 7.46.
I'm fairly convinced that quite a few of the reviews against Food, Inc. are paid for. A smear campaign. I also now believe that Hollywood operates under the same tactics. If a $150 MILLION dollar film just launched, why would they not hire an SEO to vote it up? It costs pennies on the dollar. This would instantly translate to millions of dollars in added revenue from $15 movie tickets. There's definitely a big correlation between high review scores and box office sales. Ok, not as high as it should be, but that's a different topic.
This isn't a problem exclusive to IMDB. This will effect any site with UGC (User generated content). The algorithms developers build to catch spammers are made by humans, and therefore, can be outsmarted by humans. Unfortunately, there's a lot more money in spamming than there is in anti--spamming. I'm now convinced that the internet is at least partially broken. You can't trust anything, especially not if it's coming from "real people".
Proposal, the inter-galactic anti-spam defense force.
What we need is a universal, open source, global anti-spam framework. It must be free, and easy to integrate with. And scalable. Every website can hook into this, and the system can look for patterns across the internet and shut down spammers in mass force. Would make spammer's lives a living hell. You get caught on one site, and are banned on every other site instantly. You're also more likely to be spotted - because if someone hires you to SEO a car dealership, very likely, you'll have suddenly have 50 guys all reviewing the same car dealership on the same day, giving it high scores. This would register as an irregularity. It would stand out like a sore thumb. And, if you've written any reviews prior to being caught, guess what. Those reviews, which slipped through, are now deleted and blacklisted too.
This might make it so difficult to slip fake reviews through, the SEO's would have to become legitimate businesses. If anyone wants to collaborate on building this, contact me.
Some might argue that by the very nature of posting this article I"m telling the bad guys who to beat us. I think they already know. It's the good guys who awareness needs to spread to.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/food_inc/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286537/
If enough people really hated this movie to give it 79%, surely there must be criticism. I looked - oddly, this movie is very loved. Furthermore, why the rotten tomatoes discrepancy? Are the approved reviewers so out of touch with what people really like? I would expect to see a close match.
Case in point. Saving private ryan is a 92%/93%. Almost a perfect match, as expected:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/saving_private_ryan/
So, I have another theory. The China SEO. Ask yourself this:
If you're an international, multi billion dollar food mega corp who largely depends on your reputation, and a very edgy documentary is released that has the potential to adversely affect your business, would you want to prevent this from being seen? Of course. Oh, this conspiracy is so deep an obvious now.
SEO companies, or "Search Engine Optimization" firms (many operate out of China and India) are basically spammers. Here's how it works:
You have a car dealership. You hire an SEO, pay them, say $20,000 and they magically drive traffic to your site. You suddenly have 30 five star reviews on Google Maps and Yelp. Business booms. What's happening is somewhere in India there are 100 poorly paid employees surfing the web, posting positive reviews about your US business on google local reviews, posting on forums, doing anything they can to make your business appear better than it actually is.
You can't just post these reviews yourself - that would require 30 fake accounts. Fake accounts are easy to spot, the SEO's know that. These people make a living out of fooling spam detection. They're smarter than that. Their accounts look real, because, they sort of are.
Now I wonder - IMDB is a nonprofit. Do they really have engineering staff to fight against sophisticated SEO's to prevent paid-for reviews from going through? Google is a $350 BILLION DOLLAR company with arguably 15,000 of the smartest software engineers in the world working on this problem, and it's a tough battle for them. There's no way IMDB can even remotely think about blocking SEOs.
To date, 17,239 reviewed the movie. If 1000 1.0/10.0 reviews come in, the score drops from 8.0 to to 7.46.
I'm fairly convinced that quite a few of the reviews against Food, Inc. are paid for. A smear campaign. I also now believe that Hollywood operates under the same tactics. If a $150 MILLION dollar film just launched, why would they not hire an SEO to vote it up? It costs pennies on the dollar. This would instantly translate to millions of dollars in added revenue from $15 movie tickets. There's definitely a big correlation between high review scores and box office sales. Ok, not as high as it should be, but that's a different topic.
This isn't a problem exclusive to IMDB. This will effect any site with UGC (User generated content). The algorithms developers build to catch spammers are made by humans, and therefore, can be outsmarted by humans. Unfortunately, there's a lot more money in spamming than there is in anti--spamming. I'm now convinced that the internet is at least partially broken. You can't trust anything, especially not if it's coming from "real people".
Proposal, the inter-galactic anti-spam defense force.
What we need is a universal, open source, global anti-spam framework. It must be free, and easy to integrate with. And scalable. Every website can hook into this, and the system can look for patterns across the internet and shut down spammers in mass force. Would make spammer's lives a living hell. You get caught on one site, and are banned on every other site instantly. You're also more likely to be spotted - because if someone hires you to SEO a car dealership, very likely, you'll have suddenly have 50 guys all reviewing the same car dealership on the same day, giving it high scores. This would register as an irregularity. It would stand out like a sore thumb. And, if you've written any reviews prior to being caught, guess what. Those reviews, which slipped through, are now deleted and blacklisted too.
This might make it so difficult to slip fake reviews through, the SEO's would have to become legitimate businesses. If anyone wants to collaborate on building this, contact me.
Some might argue that by the very nature of posting this article I"m telling the bad guys who to beat us. I think they already know. It's the good guys who awareness needs to spread to.
Comments
Post a Comment