All of Amazon’s Prime Video shows, including The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, supposedly have a three-day delay before users can rate them.
Sources at Variety and Deadline say that the wait is meant to stop review bombing, which is when a lot of negative comments are made about a show, movie, game, or book.
A spokesperson for Amazon said that the rule was put in place to give the service time to figure out if a user review really came from a real person or if it was written by a bot or troll trying to take over the reviews section.
Amazon started using this strategy this summer, starting with the relaunch of A League of Their Own, which was criticised by review bombers who didn’t agree with the show’s political stance.
Unfortunately, The Rings of Power is also getting a lot of bad reviews, and some people are upset that it uses actors from backgrounds that don’t get enough attention.
The series is about the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It takes place during the Earth’s Middle-Second Age.Amazon says that 25 million people from all over the world watched the first episode of the series on the day it came out. This was the biggest debut for Amazon Prime Video in history.
Even though Amazon tried to stop a flood of negative reviews on its platform, sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, which is owned by Amazon, continue to give The Rings of Power review bombs.
The show now has a 34% rating from the general public on Rotten Tomatoes, while 24.7% of reviewers on IMDb gave it one star.
Rotten Tomatoes tried to fix this problem in 2019 by adding “verified reviews,” which let users show proof that they bought tickets to the movie. It also stopped people from writing reviews for movies that hadn’t even come out yet.
This doesn’t help much with TV reviews, but it was a response to people who were spamming negative reviews of Captain Marvel, Black Panther, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi at the time.
