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.
