The Douban score…

As many of you know I have been interested in this show’s stats so I have been actively researching stats on multiple sites including Douban. From Oct 27-Oct 31, the score was never below 8.9. Even as late as 12pm ET, the score was still in that range. Plus the number of reviewers was already above 5K. Literally, overnight, a barrage of reviews in the 1 and 2 range were published. If you scroll through the reviews, you will see Nov 1st as the timestamp.

That’s very suspicious since the viewership was highest on Oct 30. It’s possible but, highly unlikely, that the several thousand reviewers held their score for 2 days and then published on the same date.

My understanding of Douban is that it’s the equivalent of IMDB in the West. This means that it’s driven by accounts that users create on the site. In addition Douban, like IMDB, has limited means to control the creation of fake accounts aka sock puppets.

This is a real problem on IMDB, and the main reason why most people and studios now disregard the IMDB scores. A few years ago, users and studios started noticing a pattern with negative scores and some movies. If the movie featured non traditional characters or non traditional actors in conventional roles, the scores were always significantly lower than content that was more traditional. This all came to a breaking point when The Black Panther was released. Despite overwhelmingly positive reviews from the audience, the IMDB score was in the low 7s. Investigations found that many of the reviewers were created by accounts that had not existed until a few hours or days before they posted. Investigations showed that it was possible to create accounts on a large scale to bombard the site.

It appears that the same thing is happening to FoF.

That makes sense. That‘s why I don’t cite IMDB or Douban scores; they’re too easily manipulated and there’s an entire IT industry dedicated to creating ghost accounts and spam. However, it seems like there’s an attempt on Weibo today to state that the show isn’t popular based on today’s Douban Score

Sounds very interesting. I’m going to check out that drama now. Thank you for the info!

To check the latest Douban score, in the original Chinese, here is the direct link : https://movie.douban.com/subject/35633771/   (you can Google translate the page)

It has been said that Douban users are prone to be harsh on "idol costume dramas", so take the ratings for those with a pinch of salt.  Nevertheless, there is also a list of "Well-known domestic dramas with over 10,000 Douban reviews" from a compiler on Douban, "Created on 2015-01-12 00:00:08 Updated on 2024-11-04 09:27:01" which includes quite a string of costume dramas. Here is the link to the translation: https://www-douban-com.translate.goog/doulist/36929192/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en   (it is about well-known dramas of the past few years since 2006, so of course does not include FoF or recent 2024 dramas, but an interesting read nonetheless; standpoint is not the level of rating per se, but the number of people who added a review, showing interest for it, so notwithstanding their rating, this list is about which ones "made the waves" and were most discussed.)

Also, despite the "low Douban rating" (c-drama news reporter Marcus even reported the opening Douban rating as starting from 4.9!),  Marcus, in his "top ten of the week" past, shown every Sunday on his Youtube channel, drawn from a mix of drama industry indicators, had "Fangs of Fortune" as #1 watched by Chinese audience, in the week leading up to November 4 with a total points 573 (close to 600, indicating a "very good week" for the drama.) The Douban rating rose anyway  (as did the number of raters, from 8359 to 31207) to present standing at 5.0  of Nov.4, 2024, but can still rise, so click on picture below to access link to latest data.

From Marcus Here! reporting on YouTube : "Fangs of Fortune" was #1 for the first time for the weekly period till Nov.4, 2024 (click on picture to watch the full episode reporting)

 Snowball:

Douban não é confiável. A nota na maioria das vezes é manipulada conforme engajamento de trolls / contas marketing 

Eles dão nota por birra / competição ou qualquer motivo que não tem nada a ver com a qualidade do drama 

I won't dispute it ;)  Black fans are known to be at work too when there is something that can have the actors branded as "idols".  That's why I wrote "take it with a pinch of salt".  It's just "pop culture".

Anyway, all ratings depend on subjectivity and other factors, so even MDL ratings (which are for the international audience : the Chinese have no use or care about these ratings) can be highly dubious to aopreciate the "real quality" of a drama (if any reliable scale to use there even exists: I don't dispute those who do cinema studies may agree on one or other, and look at specific aspects of a drama with more perspective than others). The MDL ratings like most, only reflect the majority of subjective opinion, including that of some haters or fans who are also included in the pack. 

Therefore, although  I am  interested in that a drama has been "rocking the boat" with lots of people interested, so it can perhaps come to my attention, or that it was really popular in reliable numbers of people watching (as computed by Vlinkage and other sources, aggregated in the Marcus reports)  :  in the end, I will only make my own opinion regardless if I checked the data or not.  

--- I liked that Douban was very favorable to a few unusual dramas like To The Wonder, Escape From The Trilateral Slopes, and She and Her Girls, in 2024.   It means these will be keeping a spot in the Chinese audience's possible watch list, and in my opinion, that is well deserved ; perhaps international audience will also be curious and open their minds to different  c-dramas windows there.

Wishing you all continued enjoyment in your drama watching  :)

Chen Lu, you are right, but all the ratings platforms have ratings from people who have not watched in full, sometimes just one episode and the rest on skip relying on trailers and clips. Even some reporters did that!  Therefore, like you, I don't have much trust in those ratings and superfast reporting and reviews.

Love Game In Eastern Fantasy, equally still on air, even more recent than FoF, also got an "opening Douban rating" (very favorable at 7.5 : https://movie.douban.com/subject/35750087/) and yes there are a lot of people watching it, so perhaps this "anticipated" appreciation has some merits. But the one that led the pack this week in buzz, heat index surge, character popularity, discussions, etc, is undoubtedly The Story of Pearl Girl, which has not got an opening Douban rating yet. It is a long one, 40 eps, slowly meted out at 2 per day, so reaching only 14 now. It is being recommended by several in the industry. The live streams (there is a new one today after the one from less than a week ago) will also compound the buzz. OST singer Liu Yuning (who sings and acts in TSoPG) also remarked on and recommended the 5 c-dramas he is singing for, including Fangs of Fortune, where he experiments with a "different" song  style. 

Douban ratings have been known to go up or down after first publication, and this can be due to many different reasons such as what sort of ending the drama has. Some that were seen as very good got downrated because of an end that did not satisfy audience, like killing off the most beloved characters in A Journey To Love, or the strange ending of The Double which production scrambled to amend with a short supplement to "prove" that it was a "happy end". (Sometimes those short supplements, even if nice, like in As Beautiful As You, are unnecessary; leaving me thinking : why was not it included in the last episode(s) in the first place: audience should not have to go on the hunt "elsewhere" to see the drama "completely").  

So yes, let's wait and see what happens.  

 kaddie001:

Chen Lu, et al, those are sock puppet accounts. You can hire teams in Eastern Europe to creat dummy accounts to manipulate the online scores

Please let me address your statement regarding these bots coming from Eastern Europe and explain why your statement is incorrect.

Since around 2021, apps have been subject to much stricter controls in order to take action against this and pushes from certain fandoms.

To have a rating on certain platforms, you have to be registered with a Chinese phone number. This is no longer possible with a Western number. And furthermore, China has 1.4 billion inhabitants, they don't need Eastern Europe to influence their market - this is also only possible to a limited extent, if at all, and then only from within China (China has very interesting mechanisms to control the market and platforms).

Anyone with a foreign number can no longer add a rating on Douban (this was still possible in 2020).
To get a Chinese number, you have to have lived there for at least 3 months, otherwise it will be quite difficult or even impossible to get it. The number must be verified on Chinese soil (registered in the mobile network) and only then can the number be used. SIM cards are always registered to the user or the respective company - registration is mandatory. This means that even if you buy a card on Amazon, it will only work to its full extent once you have actually been in China. These cards are known to China due to the pre-registration of the number and subsequent registration in the full name of a person. Only then can such travel cards be used - this is also only possible once they have been registered in the Chinese mobile phone network.

As a standard, you always register in the apps with your mobile phone number first. This means that if you use Weixin, Weibo or QQ to log in to other apps, for example, they automatically know your mobile phone number and do not give you certain functions at all. Such as the function for liking, commenting etc. This doesn't work in apps like Douban or Douyin... You can't do anything with a Western number.
That's why your statement about dummy accounts is wrong.
Weibo and Xiaohongshu can be used and accessed to a much greater extent. They are more about interaction between people through pictures or posts (Twitter and Instagram).
However, Weibo takes a hard line against the so-called anits. Antis is an adjective for bots or real antis who try to discredit people. Entire fan clubs of individual actors have already been banned for this, as they have committed a serious violation of morality by trying to discredit other actors.

The Chinese language is not complex because of the many characters or their grammar (the grammar is one of the simplest I have ever seen), but because of the use of a large variety (the word ‘large variety’ is an understatement) of idioms that children start to use very early in their daily speech.
Let's take an example from Fangs of Fortune umbrella means 伞 (san), ‘to separate’ is also pronounced like san (散). This is one of the reasons why certain words are not used in a certain context or why certain actions are seen as something negative.
I could give more examples, as I know a few, but this one example fits quite well, as it comes from the series itself.

This also makes longer reviews quite complex, which is why a translator is not able to produce a good translation into Chinese. To add to the difficulty, the translators choose a very formal Chinese that would never be used in the written language on any platform. In Eastern Europe, you would need a very large number of people who are able to write everyday Chinese. A translator is not able to do this either, as they do not know all the meanings of every Chinese word (I tried this once and realised that even for the term 冷/cold, not all translations can be found in the dictionary). Not even the Baidu translator is able to do this. Even he would always choose a formal Chinese that does not correspond to the written language.
This would allow foreign bots to be identified very quickly and these accounts would be banned.
Furthermore, China has 1.4 billion people and is therefore not dependent on bots abroad. The competition to be better is much higher in China than here in the West and their resources are infinite.

I hope it is now easier for you to understand why China does not need bots from Eastern European countries.

 Frost_edelweiss:

Thank you, Chen Lu, for the time you took to debunk the idea that Douban is only a den of misfits and bots, some not even from China. It is indeed more complex than that. Although I don't trust their rating blindly, it remains an interesting color of heat towards a work.  

They have bots, but these are usually real people who are paid to write reviews. However, there is also the additional dynamic of the fan clubs, which are actively addressed in the Supertopics in order to push the series.

In the eyes of the fans, this also means rating down other series that are broadcast at the same time.

It's a very complex issue.

Some supertopics even have clear requirements for fans as to what they have to do in order to stay in the groups. If these rules are not followed, you can be kicked out of the chats. That's why fans also spend their private money to promote certain series.
Not all the marketing we see actually comes from the production company. With some dramas, I've wondered where the fans get all the money to put something like this together. But of course it's the huge mass of people that counts.

Supertopics are one of the reasons why Weibo, for example, is now much better at reviewing groups and accounts, as it was even more extreme at times than it is today.