[We would like to thank Paul Jakus (@paulj) of the Dept. of Applied Economics at Utah State University for this summary of research presented at the 2024 Phish Studies Conference. -Ed.]

Numerous Phish.Net Forum threads have hypothesized about the effect of people with extreme ratings behavior on show ratings, so this post will focus on the behavior of (anonymous) individual raters. The most well-known of extreme raters are “bombers”, or those who rate all shows as a ‘1’. “Fluffers”—those who rate every show a ‘5’—have received less attention than bombers.

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