Reviews "formula"

[Morrus]

One trend which has been every noticeable is that any time an item is added to the new rating system, a bunch of people from the company's social media or forum pages will quickly arrive and give it a series of 5/5 ratings. The result being that the databse includes a lot of allegedly perfect products.

Eventually, I guess this would even out with hundreds of reviews. But in the short term it's very apparent. It's fine - they are genuine ratings - but they're very self-selecting.

Anyone know what larger sites like Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes do about this, if anything? Is there some kind of industry standard normalization method, perhaps? We can't be the first people to notice this!

Thoughts, if any?

 

[dd.stevenson]

From memory, I think both metacrtic and rotten tomatoes use propitiatory, secret formulas to compute their scores.

I think that for my money, Enworld would be best served by a brief notification on the review entry page reminding people that fair pros and cons are most valuable to potential customers. And perhaps some kind of "did you find this review helpful" button like steam or amazon.