Mob mentality on IMDB
I saw this post about IMDB as I was perusing Techmeme last night. Wow, talk about a tough situation – the new Batman movie gets voted up to #1 movie of all time even though it clearly is not deserving. Similarly, the long standing #1 – The Godfather – actually is getting voted down. What can you do? The community has been taken over by biased participants and agitators.
The holy grail is to build the perfect reputation system, where you count votes in relation to the voters “reputation”, but that is impossible to define. A reasonable alternative might be to take a cue from Wikipedia and lock voting for the Dark Knight (and possibly the top 5 movies). When Wikipedia articles are getting vandalized or constantly being fought over by various factions, moderators can come in and lock an article until emotions cool. Considering that movies have a strong temporal aspect to them – how many people will be talking about this summer’s blockbuster over Thanksgiving dinner – locking voting on the movie might do the trick. If the movie is unlocked after several months, truly passionate fans can go back and vote for their favorite movie, but the mob energy will be much more difficult to recreate. As to fixing the current vote tallies, I’m not sure. Reverting votes could result in an even more significant and wide spread backlash from the community. My recommendation would be to leave votes as they are and count on your loyal fanbase to reset the rankings to their appropriate levels. Good luck, IMDB.
John McCarthy said,
July 29, 2008 @ 8:42 am
“mob energy,” nice touch.
Will Paul said,
July 29, 2008 @ 5:42 pm
This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon though. Its already happened at least once this summer Wall-E shot up to 9 and its now just barely out of the top 25.
This argument might only be valid in the case of Dark Knight, but have you seen it? I am seriously tempted to name it my favorite movie of all time and quite possibly the best I’ve ever seen. I’m sure that time will tell, but the possibility exists that a movie’s ability to incite such a furor could be the indication of it actually being worthy of the number 1 spot. Put another way: If Godfather 1 is so fantastic, how come none of its fans systematically attacked other movies?