They didn't seem to delete user reviews for Lightyear made by all the bigots that were offended by having two women kissing in the movie so it seems that there's some preferential treatment for Amazon properties.
And deleting negative reviews by bigots at least would be more defensible than deleting negative reviews from fans of Tolkien who take issue with the treatment of the work they love.
EDIT: I still haven't seen the show yet and I originally thought the issue with review bombing was similar to people like me hating the show foundation on Apple TV... I see now that people claim that a lot of negative reviews were due to the race of characters and people claiming the "show is too woke". In that case, it's actually more of a similar situation to Lightyear. Still, it's very interesting to see the differing treatment of Lightyear, a pixar property compared to this, an Amazon show.
It feels more like the 2016 Ghostbusters remake, to be honest. Immature men going nuts over a new entry in a franchise that they have fond childhood memories of, simply because the new entry is "same but different" in a way that touches certain insecurities.
(To be sure, I doubt that an Amazon Prime series can reach the quality of "the" LotR adaption, ever. But the hysterical screaming about the series is just childish.)
It's jarringly different from the books. Names are the same and a very few elements are similar but it's really something completely different. In Asimov's work, psychohistory is not about specific heroes or great people changing things but more about the inexorable trend leading to certain outcomes. The repeated sci-fi action scenes don't really match with the original work.
That said, it's not a bad show if you watch it not having read the books. There are some decent original ideas, I liked the idea of the genetic dynasty. But, it's not Asimov's foundation, it's so different that it can hardly be said to be inspired by it. So, I wouldn't be complaining about it if it had a different name. Taking a series of well beloved books and deciding to so loosely adapt them that the end results has almost no relationship to the books feels disrespectful to me though.
So far, I prefer Foundation the series over the original Asimov book.
The book has an interesting philosophical idea (psychohistory), but just doesn't work as a story. It feels too much like a disjointed sequence of deus ex machinas. (To be fair, I've read some other stuff from Asimov's Foundation series that did work as a story.)
The TV series tells a pretty compelling story and mostly does so quite well. Of course, by far the best aspect (the genetic dynasty) isn't even part of the book at all. So yeah, it's not a faithful adaptation, but it is a better story. The only thing I'm doubtful of is whether they can keep it up. Spanning millenia in this format feels sort of impossible (except perhaps as an anthology series). How often is somebody just going to cryo-sleep for centuries and ending up in just the right place without it getting the same feeling of contrived deus ex machina as in the original book?
And deleting negative reviews by bigots at least would be more defensible than deleting negative reviews from fans of Tolkien who take issue with the treatment of the work they love.
EDIT: I still haven't seen the show yet and I originally thought the issue with review bombing was similar to people like me hating the show foundation on Apple TV... I see now that people claim that a lot of negative reviews were due to the race of characters and people claiming the "show is too woke". In that case, it's actually more of a similar situation to Lightyear. Still, it's very interesting to see the differing treatment of Lightyear, a pixar property compared to this, an Amazon show.