Amazon is reportedly putting a three-day delay on user reviews for all of its content on Prime Video, including the newly released The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. According to reports from Variety and DeadlineThe delay is believed to help prevent review bombing or flooding a particular show, movie, game, or book with negative comments.
An Amazon representative told: Variety that it has put in place the policy of giving the service time to evaluate whether a user review is coming from a real viewer – not from a bot or troll who wants to hijack the reviews section. Amazon introduced the policy earlier this summer, starting with the reboot Your own competition, who struggled with review bombers who opposed the show’s political stance.
The rings of power unfortunately has faced a similar influx of negative reviews, with some users focusing on including actors from underrepresented backgrounds. The series offers a different take on JRR Tolkien’s Under the spell of the Ring universe, and is set during Middle-earth’s Second Age. Amazon says the series collected 25 million viewers worldwide the day it premiered, making it Amazon Prime Video’s biggest debut yet.
But despite Amazon’s best efforts to stem a wave of bad reviews on its platform, it still doesn’t stop there The rings of power from getting reviews bombed on other websites, such as Rotten Tomatoes and the Amazon-owned IMDb. The series currently has an overall viewership of 34 percent at Rotten Tomatoeswhile 24.7 percent of the reviewers agreed IMDb gave it a star.
In 2019, Rotten Tomatoes tried to address this problem by deploying verified reviews that allow users to prove they bought tickets to the movie they’re reviewing. It also started blocking users from posting reviews on movies that haven’t even been released yet. Of course this doesn’t help much when it comes to TV reviews but came in response to users bombing Captain Marvel, Black Pantherand Star Wars: The Last Jedic with bad faith reviews at the time.
