review bombing
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Metacritic promises better moderation after 'abusive' Horizon DLC comments
Review aggregation site Metacritic promises to improve its moderation system after the recent release of DLC for Horizon Forbidden West prompted a rash of negative review bombing. The company has not announced exact measures but did say they are ‘currently evolving our processes and tools.’
Scammers are blackmailing restaurants across the US with one-star Google reviews
For the past week, a handful of high-profile and Michelin-starred restaurants from San Francisco to New York City have been targeted in an extortion campaign weaponizing Google reviews.
Epic Games Store will randomly ask users to rate games to prevent review bombing
Epic is trying to improve cross-play for all platforms too.
Google Maps explains how it tackles review bombing
Machine learning systems examine content and look for patterns like a burst of one-star reviews.
Steam mods will filter 'off-topic review bombs' from ratings
One of the issues with relying on user reviews to rate content is the possibility that some of those reviews may not be written in entirely good faith. Recently Rotten Tomatoes took new steps to manage the impact of fake reviews submitted for Captain Marvel, while Netflix responded to several instances of "review bombing" by removing written reviews from its service entirely. Over the years Steam has taken a few different steps to deal with the issue, but now its latest response is a combination of automated scanning and human moderation teams. In a blog post it explained the plan: "we're going to identify off-topic review bombs, and remove them from the Review Score." In practice, what it has is a tool that monitors reviews in real-time to detect "anomalous" activity that suggests something is happening. It alerts a team of moderators, who can then look through the reviews who will investigate, and if they do find that there's a spate of "off-topic reviews," then they'll alert the developer, and remove those reviews from the way the game's score is calculated, although the reviews themselves will stay up.
