Review systems like that don’t always achieve what they set out to. Amazon, for example, has verified reviews but it’s apparently fairly trivial for sellers to game the system by paying people to buy and review the product, or other similar tactics - the sales benefit of having a high rated product that places well in the algorithm, is worth the cost involved in creating the interference.
'Zactly. As long as somebody can profit, or gain lulz, for F***ing with the ratings, they will.
Moderating, this is attacking a poster, there is a perfectly fine pit thread for that. Use it instead.
I’ll hide your post, don’t do this again.
Review bombing something you didn’t see/read might be more acceptable if you’re familiar with the creator’s body of work, have seen/read excerpts of the movie/book in question and have familiarity with other, detailed reviews.
Not that I would ever do such a thing. 
Right. There is a significant difference between seeing a book cover, trailer, whatever, and hearing a cultural agenda inspired take, and jumping on a this is horrible bandwagon, and having heard/seen other work of the artist and reading a reasonable selection of conformed reviews about it.
It is to me the same behavior even when the “review” is just a trashing in a small social circle. All that is needed is hearing that Snow White is Latina now, or a quote out of context about “dwarves” or “woke” or “misogynistic” and off to the races by those who have neither read/heard/seen the work or have any familiarity with what the creator’s track record is. They don’t need to know because they already know all they need to know and they feel obligated to speak up on it.
They are still part of the mob reaction.
So you would call it “review bombing” if someone said at a diner party, “my cousin says she didn’t like the movie, so i don’t plan to go.” ? That seems like such a broad definition as to be meaningless.
No I wouldn’t. Why would you think I would? Honestly that seems to be a bit of an exaggeration and twisting of what I did say.
Let me make it crystal clear.
I am not talking about passing on that someone you know saw it and did not like it and sharing that based on that word of mouth, or preview in the theater, or commercial, or review, it does not interest you.
I am talking about individuals passing and sharing judgement on, opining and debating about, something sight unseen, fairly exclusively based on some understanding (misunderstanding) conclusions jumped to, of how it fits in with any specific cultural agenda.
These individuals are not necessarily acting under explicit directives or as part of a plan to attack the product for where they perceive or misperceive it to be on their cultural agenda axis, but they do act like a flock of birds or school of fish, with large group impacts based often on little to no actual knowledge of the work. But they heard … on line … in a review … from a friend … from a “news” host … how awful this … woke/sexist/whatever thing is.
I used Snow White as the example because it was mind boggling to me how many posters here were willing to state with confidence how horrible the Snow White movie will be for one reason or another based on their own sense of cultural agendas even though it isn’t even done with production yet and no one here actually knows anything about how good or awful the movie will be. Other than a Disney live action remake, which does inform some.
There seems to me to be very little difference in any fundamental manner from multiple individuals posting negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes of a movie they have not seen motivated by how they feel it fits with their cultural agenda.
So it’s “review bombing” if someone makes any negative comment, if that person hasn’t personally seen the work (and is not familiar with the creators track record) and if there’s some political element to the negativity?
That’s a hell of a lot broader than the Wikipedia entry
Which does say that review bombs typically are an attempt to draw attention to a political or social issue, but also includes “an attempt to harm sales” and “meant to disrupt established ratings”. And suggests the reaction is coordinated. (And doesn’t say anything about whether the review-bombers have actually seen the thing.)
So, for instance, one of Bujold’s more recent Vorkosigan books introduces the idea that an established character is bisexual and in a polyamorous relationship. And there are a ton of reviews on “Goodreads” saying, “i hated this book, i can’t believe she did that to this character”. But i don’t get any sense those reviews are coordinated or meant to disrupt sales. They are certainly related to political and social issues. I don’t know whether the reviewers have read the book. Goodreads is intended to be comments from people who read it, though.
Review bomb? Or just reviews by disappointed fans?
(You edited your post as i wrote this, but I think it’s still responsive.)
Yes I am familiar with the Wikipedia entry. And I am familiar that sometimes usage evolves before a source like Wikipedia reflects. Which of course why I created this thread, to get a sense of current usage by others and to see if my usage was in fact way off from how others use the phrase. I’m so sure how explicit the desire to disrupt sales needs to be when a mass of people engage in an agenda based bad mouthing of something sight unseen.
But my claim in the last several entries was not that those behaviors are review bombing but essentially the “same behavior” with “very little difference between” it and the sort of behavior on Rotten Tomatoes that gets more comfortably agreed as review bombing.
No. Let me quote from myself above.
Is there no meaningful difference between “some” and “fairly exclusively” to your read? Is there a reason that you read one but honestly understood and portrayed it as the other?
I lean to review bomb. I do not think explicit coordination is required and of course anyone posting negative comments on Good Reads implicitly understands that its impact in aggregate may be to decrease sales.
Yeah, i clearly fail to grok your use of “review bombing” in a substantial way. I think it’s partly that the word is dripping with disapproval, and it seems very weird to me to use a negative label for people who care about the political and social implications of a work (regardless of their politics) and not for people who dislike a work for any other reason.
I can see being upset by a coordinated effort to sink a work that has barely been launched (whether you dislike its politics or its creators or the people who will make money off it, or you are just mad that it violates the canon of a work it’s derived from). I can’t see applying a negative label to people who aren’t acting in a coordinated way and just care about exactly one of those things.
So you are drawing a line in such a weird-to-me place (if I’m understanding you correctly) that I’m trying to fit it into some category that makes sense to me.
So we can put you down for “review bombing” being a coordinated attack explicitly motivated by a desire to negatively impact sales often but not necessarily motivated by political agenda.
And if I understand your take, given that those are your key features, the similarities I see are very invalid to you?
I have another requirement. I wouldn’t count any honest text-only review (“i don’t like it because xyz”) because those are what they are. I would only count reviews that involve messing up a rating. Like giving a low rating on IMDb. Or on goodreads, which involves a rating. Or a fake text review (“i thought it was boring and the acting was bad” written by someone who was actually upset about something unrelated, like having Black actors.)
But i understand that you don’t think that’s an important aspect.
I do think that’s important, because i think to merit the epithet there should be an element of misleading others by the actions. I actually think that’s the most important thing.
I’d say that review bombing must be on some sort of actual review site. But I disagree that a text only review can’t be review bombing, because even text-only reviews get aggregated into “scores” where they are counted as positive or negative. And I do not agree that admitting you’ve not seen it makes it not review bombing. In fact, that was not uncommon in the early days, before review sites started actively removing such reviews.
(I also note that, if you’re a critic, you don’t have to post the review on the site in question. You can usually post it elsewhere and submit it. Or, if you’re famous enough, it may just be counted regardless of whether you submitted. However, critics generally do not review bomb, so that’s not all that relevant.)
So, no, it’s not review bombing in any of those other locations you described. It’s not talking about it with friends, or posting on some unrelated forum.
Also, I have since read part of the thread that I think inspired this one. I was under the impression that DSeid was saying that a certain post read like a review bomb, not that it actually was one. That, if posted on a review site, it would have been a review bomb.
Up until now, I thought it was given that a review bomb must be on a reviewing website (or real world equivalent, I guess).
While that thought is accurate I do want to emphasize that the intent of this thread was and is NOT to litigate any mod action there. It was in fact as you wrote, the inspiration for me wanting to clarify my understanding of the phrase’s meaning to others.
I am concluding that my understanding island @puzzlegal’s are at opposite poles of a spectrum of usage: hers extremely narrow focused on that the action is coordinated economically motivated and even requiring numerical ratings; mine focused on the prime motivation being the perceived social or political agenda with very little to no actual knowledge of the thing. Individuals ending up acting in aggregate deliver the force of the blast without awareness of others acting the same required.
If it feeds a score, sure, it can be a review bomb. I didn’t realize that was done with anything other than professional-reviewer reviews, which, as you say, are really a different category. But if there’s software pulling text reviews into an aggregate, sure, I’ll count that.
Not responding to any specific posts here but I see review bombing as a semi-coordinated attempt to tank a product’s ratings due to factors not directly tied to its ‘artistic’ value. It’s not necessarily coordinated like you get the email to go one-star things but the internet places you haunt have people saying “We should give this zero stars to show them what we think of [thing]!”
This is different from regular ole not liking things where your primary complaint is about it as a piece of media and you’re not setting out to “destroy” it, just give your opinion. If I think a new Star Wars movie is just bad and give it a low rating, I don’t actually care if it makes money or not and I’m not trying to teach anyone a lesson, I just figure I’ll add my voice to saying it’s not a good movie. If I’m mad that this movie has a woman/LGBT/minority in some key role, then my motivations are different. I’ve never seen a group of people say “This film has every right to exist but I didn’t like it much so let’s all go tank its ratings!”
One place I see a lot of this is in video games. Everything from “They used AI on the splash screen art” to “They’re using copy protection I don’t like” to “They updated a 20 year old game and removed a scene where you saw a woman’s panties for a half second” can get a swarm of angry internet hornets not only rating that game down but every other game the publisher ever released. All in a move to try to teach the developers a lesson rather than because they think the actual game is isn’t enjoyable on its own merits.