The tragedy of public movie critique

There are always people who like or dislike it no matter how great the movie is. Audiences leave them comments on a movie to compliment or complain about it. Douban, one of the most popular movie review website in China, has a huge amount of users’ comment under a movie.

Is there anything wrong?

There is a movie released and got a great reputation at the beginning. Many comments under this movie are talking about how amazing it is, and other audiences click like on them, then the most liked one will be randed at the top. However, one day, people found that the most popular comments became negative ones. What happened?

For some reasons, not everyone is happy with seeing the increased reputation of the movie. Then they message users who have positive comments on the top, providing them cash compensation to let them change their comments into negative ones. Some users did say yes. And then there is what we saw before. Many likes given to positive comments are still there, but the content of comments changed. The worse fact is, people cannot cancel their “like”.

How is it supposed to be?

It is reasonable that users have to access to change their comments after publishing it. And we might think what happened in this movie is just an extreme case. But still, other people should enjoy the right to cancel their like no matter how the situation is, either to withdraw the wrong operation or to prevent the extreme situation.