Published on December 15, 2021| No. 2719
Last night, Douban made an official response to the situation that the two dramas "Wind Rises Luoyang" and "Who is the Murderer" are suspected of encountering water army control and evaluation. These two dramas are the most recent hit dramas, and there are absurd phenomena in Douban: the former has been postponed due to technical problems, but in the original broadcast time, the Douban comment area has five stars and one star ratings. The latter heroine Zhao Liying did not appear in the first two episodes, but the comment area has been evaluated for her acting skills.
Douban responded: "In the comments written before the wind rises in Luoyang", there are 6752 five-star praises and 649 one-star bad reviews. After the start of the broadcast, there were 3956 abnormal ratings, 1687 five-star reviews, and 1991 one-star bad reviews.
"Who's the Murderer" has 244 illegal short reviews for actors who did not appear, and the abnormal score is 3209. All irregular reviews have been processed and do not count towards the official statistics of ratings.
Unfortunately, netizens did not buy it. When the "Douban Movie" official micro has not yet selected comments, in the Weibo comments, most of the fans of the "Wind Rise Luoyang" drama occupy the front row, mainly for the "five-star to one-star" function of Douban. Their point of doubt is that many short reviews that were originally five stars were highly praised by fans, and then quickly changed to one star.
In fact, this function, when the movie "The Wandering Earth" was released, had been boiling over, and the response given by Douban was that the score was significantly modified to be an abnormal rating and would not be counted in the total score.
Counting last night's incident, douban has been difficult recently. Fine interviews, ban groups, takedown rectification... None of them are good hurdles. The problem needs to be solved urgently and cannot be delayed.
At present, Douban mainly faces a two-fold dilemma. One is that the fairness of the rating has been questioned, and the other is that the Douban group that provides community functions is becoming more and more smokey. The former threatens the lifeblood of Douban, as we all know, Douban is a platform for the family to score "books and videos"; the latter threatens the income of Douban, and more and more phenomena show that the community can make money, especially for Douban, which has a serious temperament of Wenqing.
As for the takedown incident that occurred some time ago, although there are also rumors that "the sick speech of the group members led to the removal", from the explanation given by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, this is more like a coincidence.
In this article, I mainly want to explore three questions: Is the current Douban score fair? Why is there such a big controversy about the Douban score? Can we still trust the Douban score now?
Let's start with the first question. The conclusion is that in most cases, the Douban score is of reference value.
Before talking about this question, let's understand how the Douban score is calculated. In December 2015, Douban founder Yang Bo (Abei) released a long article "Eight Questions on Douban Movie Ratings", which talked in detail about the Douban scoring mechanism.
Although the article has been published for 6 years, it is still the most detailed official interpretation of the Douban score at present. In the explanatory article given by the official micro this time, Abei's "Eight Questions" was also quoted at the end.
The highlights of the Eight Questions are as follows:
Douban score adheres to the "one person, one vote" algorithm. If 420,000 registered users are scored, the program will convert 420,000 1-5 stars into 0-10 points, adding up to 420,000 is the Douban score.
Scores are updated in real time, with no review or human oversight. There is no possibility of artificial manipulation of the Douban score. There is no background function of "modifying the average score of the movie" in the system.
The anti-cheat mechanism is also very simple, "everything that can be judged to be an abnormal rating does not count".
This "judgment" depends on the program. "Abnormal ratings" are mainly divided into four categories: those who register/acquire accounts with high scores; those who register/acquire accounts with low scores; those who "attack Douban" by star fan groups; and those who "defend the fairness of Douban scores" by hardcore users. There are water troops, but the score is difficult to be brushed successfully.
These points mainly talk about two aspects. First, due to the mechanism of Douban, it is difficult to "cheat" successfully. Even if efforts are made, in most cases, they will be recognized by the system and deleted or banned. Second, the abnormal score of Douban is mainly composed of four parts, which are also the main identification objects of the program.
There was one thing to note in Douban's response last night: Douban has never had and will not have any cooperation related to ratings. This means that Douban has never been off the field, and everything about the rating is a spontaneous act.
In Douban want to brush a high score for a drama, it is very expensive. Douban is extremely strict about the identification of "abnormal scores", and if you want the score to be effective, the "old number" with reasonable footprints and reasonable behavior of Douban is the premise. Because of the high cost of the "number raising" of the water army, whether it is a long or short review, a discussion area or a like, compared with other platform data, it is the highest.
For example, the maintenance quotation of Douban long and short comments and discussion areas is 25-40 yuan / article, and the like is 2 yuan / one. General maintenance can not be brushed separately, to maintain the review and then use the like to push up the praise, and then use the simple 4, 5 star praise with high rating. If the popularity of this show is very high, the maintenance cost will be ridiculously high.
So I said earlier that most Douban scores are valuable. But there are exceptions. For example, for episodes with ratings that have not exceeded 10,000, the cost of brushing points will be much lower. Especially those with low attention, it is easier.
For another example, the fans of traffic stars have long learned to effectively "raise numbers". In the past two years, the practice of registering a trumpet to play five stars has gradually disappeared, replaced by a "stitch in the needle" based on the Douban scoring rule.
In fact, almost every fan of a traffic star will have a department dedicated to Douban. It has a set of rules for Douban scoring, such as new accounts can not score one or five stars; to score more, enrich the home page dynamics; in response to the characteristics of Douban anti-water army activities, they have also taken different countermeasures.
In addition to the fans who generate electricity for love, the formation of the water army industry chain and the entry of more and more marketing companies have also had a great impact on the Douban score. With the cancellation of the number of broadcasts in front of the long video platform and the rectification of Weibo super talk, Douban has become one of the few public platforms with reference value. In order to control the Douban score, behaviors such as water army number raising and buying and selling accounts have become more and more common. Many marketing companies are also well aware of its operation channels, and have rushed to Douban.
However, if some people like it, some people hate it. There are fans, and naturally there are black fans. If there are marketers who brush high scores, there are low scores for buying at home. One after the other, the hedge is created. Although the number of the latter is less than the former, due to the particularity of the Douban scoring system, the power of bad reviews is often much greater than that of praise. Barely offset.
So we can see that the Douban score of "Wind Rises Luoyang" and "Who is the Murderer" is around 7.0 points. Putting aside the so-called pink-and-black filter, this achievement is fair. The strengths and weaknesses of both works are quite obvious.
Then let's talk about the second question, why does the Douban score cause a controversy after a while?
Problems can be analyzed from two levels. The fundamental reason is that the Douban revision has brought too many outsiders.
After 2012, Douban's daily activity increased significantly. In the face of an increasingly large number of users, Douban chose to reorganize.
After the reorganization, the original Douban community was aggregated into the main station, and the retention rate of users was stabilized through social play. Its core three major sections, books, movies and music, have been independently operated as commercial products.
The drastic structural adjustment has led to the loss of a number of core users represented by the knowledge elite in the early days of Douban, and at the same time, a large area of new users has poured in, and the user structure of Douban has tended to be popular.
The change in the ecology of the Douban group in 2018 further accelerated the large-scale influx of fans.
Fans output a lot of short comments
Nowadays, many users who are keen to score domestic dramas are stationed with the rise of entertainment Douban groups. But once, Douban book video users and group users were clearly distinguished. The former is based on quality, pursues fairness, rejects commercialization, and encourages the output of personalized perspectives; the latter often brings together points of common interest.
The essential reason is to target traffic stars. In 2018, the tide of domestic variety shows rose. Douban's original peaceful situation was broken. From the beginning of "Idol Trainee", the ecology of the Douban group has completely changed. It has brought Douban countless fanatical fans who regard gossip as a career, and everyone is a "Sherlock Holmes" in the field of gossip, whose sensitivity to gossip and celebrity peripheral information exceeds most publicity and marketing teams.
Fans have poured in, and naturally they have to maintain their own "children". They see bad reviewers as beasts of prey, eager to eat their flesh and drink their blood. Thus, a "war" between fans and black fans began.
In general, movies are more difficult to score. The movie is the base camp of Douban, which supports the considerable daily life of Douban. Some people do not watch domestic dramas, but they also accept domestic movies. The basic amount is large, and the brush score is more expensive and more difficult.
There have been so many accidents, can we still trust the Douban score? This doesn't seem to be a problem. Because, the public can believe that only the Douban score remains. In addition to the box office that represents the popularity of the movie, the public rating of cat's eye and ticket sales can also be used as a word-of-mouth voucher. What about episodes? The ratings of TV series and the popularity of online dramas only represent whether the audience loves to watch or not, and cannot explain the reputation of the work. This has long been an indisputable truth.
But do we really need to decide whether to watch a work based on the so-called "reputation of merit"?
I'm afraid not. In recent years, more and more netizens have taken the score of Douban as a standard. More and more filmmakers are proud to get a high score in Douban; some filmmakers specifically cater to the aesthetics of Douban to make high-scoring movies. Some media cater to the interests of netizens, saying that they must call Douban, completely forgetting the judgment function that they should undertake.
What's more, because he hates an actor and creator, he chose to give a low score for his work in Douban. The Douban score is like a shackle, hanging on the heads of creators and connoisseurs, and no one can extract it.
This should not have been the case. There should be a standard for public judgment in the work, but it is not necessary to take "the word of the family" as the criterion. Its more important significance should be as an Internet book and audio-visual database. You can find the latest boot news in it, and you can also discuss overseas movies from a hundred years ago.
I want to say that instead of letting Douban redeem itself, it is better for the public to calm down. Douban should indeed be rectified, but the focus should be on its smoky miasma group. Knowing what Tiger Po can do, why can't Douban and Weibo do it? As for the rating thing, let it go. Who can control subjective aesthetics? In 2021, some people still think that "Guernica" is a child's doodle, let alone a mediocre series?
【Text/Ma II】