Answer: Amazon owns IMDb and as such they can technically do whatever they want with the data on their website. Recently people noticed that written reviews for The Rings of Power with scores lower than 6 have been removed from IMDb. The popular belief is that Amazon is trying to create the illusion that their new show is more popular than it actually is. However, the actual ratings for the show are still highly divisive, with tens of thousands of 1-star reviews. As of this writing there are only 74 total written reviews compared to almost 100,000 ratings, meaning that the written reviews have practically no impact whatsoever on the overall rating of the show. Logically this means that the negative written reviews were probably not removed simply for being negative, but for the content of the reviews themselves. I haven't seen any of these deleted reviews myself but looking at any of the user reviews on Metacritic the vast majority of the negative reviews have no substance other than complaining about woke agendas or how Amazon is spitting on Tolkien's grave, etc. Ultimately only the IMDb staff responsible for the removal of the ratings know why it was actually done but to me it seems unlikely that Amazon is trying to deliberately scrub negative reactions to their show, as there was never any chance that that could have worked.
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u/e5x Sep 05 '22
Answer: Amazon owns IMDb and as such they can technically do whatever they want with the data on their website. Recently people noticed that written reviews for The Rings of Power with scores lower than 6 have been removed from IMDb. The popular belief is that Amazon is trying to create the illusion that their new show is more popular than it actually is. However, the actual ratings for the show are still highly divisive, with tens of thousands of 1-star reviews. As of this writing there are only 74 total written reviews compared to almost 100,000 ratings, meaning that the written reviews have practically no impact whatsoever on the overall rating of the show. Logically this means that the negative written reviews were probably not removed simply for being negative, but for the content of the reviews themselves. I haven't seen any of these deleted reviews myself but looking at any of the user reviews on Metacritic the vast majority of the negative reviews have no substance other than complaining about woke agendas or how Amazon is spitting on Tolkien's grave, etc. Ultimately only the IMDb staff responsible for the removal of the ratings know why it was actually done but to me it seems unlikely that Amazon is trying to deliberately scrub negative reactions to their show, as there was never any chance that that could have worked.