this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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Inventing Reality

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Yeah sure, this movie with 1.3 rating and 5 (out of 100) metascore, with only 50k ratings, is the #1 movie this week. The algorithm is really transparent and trustworthy, clearly there's no manipulation going on.

(for those who don't know, IMDb is owned and operated by Amazon)

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[–] thefattyd@lemmy.world 6 points 12 hours ago

You look at the audience score and it's 100%. Look closer and the 100% is from something called audience verified. Meanwhile the actual audience is way lower. It's maddening

[–] Flyberius@hexbear.net 10 points 15 hours ago

99% audience score on rotten tomatoes. They are claiming those are not bot reviews. Hahaha

They tried giving us a martyr in Charlie Kirk, now we have more myth making with this Melania nonsense. It's so blunt too...

[–] tyler@programming.dev 4 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Might be numbers one because of so many ratings, not cause the ratings are good.

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 15 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

#3 has way more ratings and way higher ones too:

I guess it could be lower because it's a series or something, but #10 is a movie, has a higher rating, and has more ratings too:

My only other idea of what "popularity" could mean is the page view count, but then it should probably be called something other than "top 10 on IMDb" IMHO.

[–] Windex007@lemmy.world 4 points 15 hours ago

If I were tasked with implementing an algorithm tasked with being "justifiable" but also putting it at the top, I'd simply refuse.

If I was a complicit piece of shit, though, I'd probably use engagement, scaled by recency... with whatever recency curve puts it at number 1.

[–] tyler@programming.dev 0 points 8 hours ago

Yeah but the list is “this week” not “this month” for the second and tenth ones or “all time” for the third one. So even if you got 91k reviews this month (#10 came out on jan 16th) that’s, let’s check it, an average of 30k a week. And most reviews would have come in the first week anyway.

So this really cemented it even more for me, it’s literally just number of “actions” on any given listing in a week. Especially since the top two are really low rated.