An Introduction to Angry Reviews on Redbox – Info Gadgets

Living Anonymously in Cyber Hell

There are very few things in life with lower stakes than renting a movie from Redbox. A Redbox DVD costs $1.50 per day which is, at least to my knowledge, the cheapest legal method of renting a brand new movie. To make things even easier, their kiosks are located outside drug stores, gas stations, fast food chains, and grocery stores. You do not even have to return a disk to the same kiosk you rented it from. If you plan your day right, you will never have to make a special trip on Redbox’s behalf. Disks are due back the next day at 9 p.m. local time so, unless you pick the movie up late at night, you’re almost always getting longer than 24-hour access to the movie. Picking a bad movie on Redbox is the smallest form of loss I know. However, none of this has stopped Redbox users from posting manic, angry reviews of the movies they rented on the company’s website.

Redbox.com allows its users to review films they have seen. These reviews appear below each movie’s profile (here’s an example from 2017’s Jumanji) . Last year, I wrote an article about Redbox user anger towards three films with a progressive message: Get Out (2017), Fences (2016), and Moonlight (2016). However, angry Redbox reviews extend to films of every genre and political affiliation.

It is unclear what someone can gain from posting a review on Redbox.com. Unlike other online review systems, there is no way to tell a reviewer their description was “useful”. Also, you cannot reply to any other person’s review of the movie. You can only create your own review. No movie reviewer on Redbox.com will ever be directly challenged, praised, or asked to elaborate on their point. There is not even a system in place to verify the user rented the movie they’re reviewing. Everyone’s opinion simply exists, unchallenged but buried.

Except for screen capturing, there is no way to share a review from Redbox.com. There is no “share” button. In fact, no review gets its own URL. A movie like A Quiet Place (2018) has, of this writing, 104 pages of reviews and there is only one URL that leads you to any of them.

There is no way to see all of the movies a Redbox user has reviewed. If, for example, I am inspired to see what else “pokeemOn” reviewed on Redbox.com after reading their review of A Quiet Place, there would be no way to do that. There is no profile for pokeemOn or any other Redbox.com user. I could not even find pokeemOn’s review of A Quiet Place through Google searches.

When you make an account on Redbox.com, you can see how many points you have wracked up through the company’s loyalty program. You can also see which Redbox is closest to you, send the gift of free Redboxes to those you love, and look at your own personal settings. The icon used to symbolize your settings looks similar to the one Facebook has used for people without a profile picture. This implies, of course, that you can upload a photo. You never have that option. Redbox does not allow users to even self-impose measures of accountability before posting a review. Is it any surprise, then, that they get reviews like the ones below for A Ghost Story (2017)?

Or this review of Moonlight?

Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and other platforms allow people to connect with each other through the content they share or publish, regardless of whether or not they have met in person, a phenomenon I will hereafter refer to as “digital intimacy”. For example, if you share a meme that represents your sense of humor, it is possible to make a sincere connection to someone you have never met. “Each little update — each individual bit of social information-is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane,” says Clive Thomson in an article on digital intimacy, “But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait.”

“For example, if you share a meme that represents your sense of humor, it is possible to make a sincere connection to someone you have never met.”

There are, of course, downsides to digital intimacy. Some people profit off users’ desire to share information. It is also still unclear what replacing face-to-face contact with digital communication will do to us, if anything, long-term. Redbox reviews are, in many ways, the opposite vision of a digital community, one in which everyone is relatively anonymous, free to post whatever it is they want, and walk away at any time with seemingly no repercussions.

This promise of anonymity will remind many people of the early appeal of the internet. “You could make comments anonymously. Go to a webpage anonymously,” writes Aspen Institute CEO Walter Isaacson in an op-ed for The Atlantic, “For years, the benefits of anonymity on the net outweighed its drawbacks. Now the problem is nobody can tell if you’re a troll. Or a hacker. Or a bot. This has poisoned civil discourse, enabled hacking, permitted cyberbullying, and made email a risk.”

Redbox.com, with its interface, sends a clear message to its reviewers that their words will never be traced back to them. This message, no matter how true or untrue it may be, is a substantial reason why a super casual movie watching experience becomes a breeding ground for surprisingly intense rhetoric.

Walter Isaacson, in his op-ed, seems to believe it is possible to balance extremes of hyper-anonymity and the everyday monetization of personal data. “Most internet engineers think that [reforms] are possible, from Vint Cerf, the original TCP/IP coauthor, to Milo Medin of Google, to Howard Shrobe, the director of cybersecurity at MIT. ‘We don’t need to live in cyber hell,’ Shrobe has argued. Implementing them is less a matter of technology than of cost and social will.”

Isaacson notes “social will”, and this appears to be a major impediment to progress. On Facebook and Twitter, millions of users put their interests, jokes, and concerns into a digital platform to form a version of themselves that others could learn of and interact with. That version was then used to sell them products and generally made them feel unsafe. The negativity from that experience could lead users to plan for a more sustainable, healthy digital community. However, it could also be tempting to return to the internet’s earliest promise of anonymity, as many have on Redbox.com. After all, how far can a public forum stray from its initial principals before it collapses entirely? Few things feel more endemic to the internet than talking smack about a Star Wars movie with the screen name “Luv2Bnude” with no picture attached, no personal information, and no way to find out more.