Most people don't seem to care anymore, lol.
The ugly, stinky, gargantuan truth about MAL's review system is that there was no winning with it in the first place, it's a lost cause. The initial system that was replaced by facebook emojis was most subject to botting and one can see that for themselves with all the front-page reviews of that era that were botted (whether by a third party or the reviewer). The system that replaced it made botting transparent but still became the most exploitative due to people unable to think collectively and refrain from spamming negative emojis on undesirable reviews instead of just pushing them down with favourable ones. And the new system's attempt at randomising promotion is feeble because despite its attempts at quelling familiar faces from taking the front page, it arguably just makes it worse; now you can write a well-written, successful review with engagement in the hundreds and it will have no chance of seeing the front page because some popular reviewer happened to share one of three recommendation tags as you. It also has no answer to the 'Most voted' and 'Suggested' picks from being manipulated by positive botting.
You should honestly just do away with reviews on the details page entirely like AniList and IMDb effectively have instead of the Frankenstein state it's currently at. It fixes any and all problems and no one cares for diversity quotas anyway because unless they're looking at an obscure title, the only thing that matters is what the colour and number of the review is; not its "perspective". You can't do anything about that because it's just human nature.
KitsuFrost said:At least there is a possibility it will prevent trolling reviews, such as the ones made for famous series last year and this current one.
I guess this is really the best thing to come out of this update (even if the front page for most seasonals still looks like a mess). No more inarticulate, flamebaiting preliminaries by empty accounts hogging up the top 3 like those atrocious ones people had the misfortune of witnessing for Bleach Sennen Kessen-hen last year - especially those two most (down)voted ones, one of which was written by a bot account.
kinotabii said:Edit: I take back calling this update almost decent. It's actually complete garbage because spoiler-based reviews are not only hidden from the default review page but also the front page now. I guess the bold red "Spoiler" tag for such reviews weren't enough because we can't read and have no cognitive control over our sight. If you want to go into plot-specifics when writing a review instead of making generic statements, you've already lost. Mods never considered the fact that some people don't care about spoilers, that anyone who's already watched the anime obviously doesn't, and that people who do care about spoilers can just look away after seeing the red tag or just refresh the page.
Oh damn, I just realised. No wonder the new system looked inconsistent when I was checking a couple of pages earlier. Hopefully it's just a bug (which I unfortunately doubt [UPDATE: it's actually completely intentional by them]), otherwise the mods couldn't be more transparent with their biases.