this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Let me know if you ever find an entertainment review medium that isn't actually comprimised ok. If you do, I bet it's crowdsourced, not made by a company.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)
[–] partial_accumen 33 points 1 year ago

RedLetterMedia

Clearly in the pockets of Big Pizza Roll.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Red Letter Media is like working class Roger and Ebert. When they discuss things they do a great job of clarifying their personal preferences separate from their criticisms.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago

I would agree with you to until I saw the cobweb review last night. That movie is absolutely garbage, I think they are getting some kind of kick back

[–] chakan2 4 points 1 year ago

Crowdsourced won't work either since the crowd is compromised.

It costs pennies a review to get a bot army going.

[–] hesusingthespiritbomb 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you want a real answer find a YouTuber with a moderate following that you enjoy and listen to them.

There are plenty of them that are genuinely fun to watch but not big enough that studios try to influence them. They are also all Canadian for some reason.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I don't watch youtubers, fuck Google sorry

[–] sheogorath 2 points 1 year ago

Use ad blockers so you're just a drain on their servers.

[–] themeatbridge 2 points 1 year ago

Piped, friend. Watch Youtube without supporting google.

[–] reddig33 26 points 1 year ago

Would this be illegal under “payola” laws?

[–] TruTollTroll 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Who has ever taken RT as a legitimate critiques site? I mean; half the movies they say suck, are in fact amazing, and their high rated ones, are just Hollywood garbage with some A list names...

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Rotten Tomatoes doesn't rate movies, they aggregate scores based on favorable/unfavorable reviews. All movie ratings are unreliable unless you are familiar with the reviewer or read their explanations.

I love the separate RT critic and audience scores. For something like Cocaine Bear I only care about the audience rating, while more serious movies I check out both.

[–] TruTollTroll 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Huh, interesting.

I have only ever seen them referenced to movies I look up. I always see a rotten tomato score and they usually are wrong.. I didn't realize RT is bigger than that

Thanks 😊👍

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, the generic Rotten Tomato score that you see in articles is the critics score, and critics are all over the place. The Rotten Tomatoes website lets you see both scores and all of the individual reviews for both critics (with a quick summary of around 10 or so right there) and audience reviews. You can dive into any of those to get a better idea of whether their opinion is worth paying attention to.

For example, if you skim the critic reviews and the negative ones criticize the movie for including things you like, then you can dismiss those reviews. It does a great job of putting them all in one place for visibility.

[–] TruTollTroll 4 points 1 year ago

Wow, 🤯 TIL. Thank you for the information!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's possible you just have bad taste in movies

[–] TruTollTroll 0 points 1 year ago

Nah, that's not it lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The new Mario movie comes to mind for me. I don't normally watch movies, but I agree with the 95% audience score even though critics hated it. Everybody else I know who saw the movie liked it too.

[–] Mindlight 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I second this. Here in Sweden we used to have a movie site where they applied some magic to the calculation and presented how you would rate a movie on a scale 1-5 and they were always correct within ±1 point. So fx a 3 could be either 2, 3 or 4 etc etc. While the site still exists it has seen better days so RT had been my go-to site for movie scores and reviews.

[–] rustyfish 5 points 1 year ago

I went there once to check for opinions on the 2016 Deadpool movie.

Then I saw a negative review of some angry dough ball crying about why Deadpool was feminist propaganda.

I left that site and never looked back.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It happened to the Better Business Bureau, Yelp, Google Reviews, Amazon Reviews. If you google random products + reviews, you'll get limitless "review websites" with the product you are looking at, with lots of suspicious "affiliate" links.

All reviews on the internet are BS. In the past, Consumer Reports was seen as legitimate, it's the only one who might be legit now.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not all reviews are BS--all review sites are BS. Plenty of real people post real reviews mixed in with the fake ones.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

That's fair. The signal-to-noise ratio makes it hard to determine truth.

[–] Potatos_are_not_friends 7 points 1 year ago

My old job bought reviews. We had apps with millions of downloads, and at least half of the reviews were purchased. We've had thousands of five star reviews to our brick and mortar stores, all paid for to boost our presence.

Whenever we launch a new thing, we'd have hundreds of reviews ready. Kinda like leaving a few dollars in a tip jar to get the energy going.

Welcome to modern day business practice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The Better Business Bureau was always a protection racket. Businesses pay (a lot) for membership. If you aren't a member you can't respond to complaints and it impacts your business negatively. Members can respond to a complaint and no matter what the response is, or if the customer is satisfied, the complaint gets marked as resolved.

[–] Macaque 1 points 1 year ago

Temu is pretty blatant about buying reviews on play store as well as it's own.

[–] Ghostalmedia 12 points 1 year ago

Life Hacker is going to add this to their upcoming “Christmas gifts for under $50” blog post

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Looking at both critic and audience reviews scores on these sites is often a good indicator.

If there's a large disparity between the two, someone made some money (and interestingly, it happens most often with AAA games ...).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Depends. This was more often done for indie movies. The audience score can be prone to brigading.

[–] afraid_of_zombies 7 points 1 year ago

Hey remember a few years ago when people were talking about film critics being bribed by Disney?

[–] YoBuckStopsHere 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm the only rating site I care about. Everything else is compromised.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wish future me could let me know a movie sucked before hand.

[–] YoBuckStopsHere 5 points 1 year ago

It's pretty easy to tell if you look at the director, writer, and studio if it will suck.

https://definitivedose.com/greatest-modern-screenwriters/

[–] Smacks 5 points 1 year ago

Explains why critics will rate movies a 10 and users a 4

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

you don't say

[–] Vellingo 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I thought this was already known

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

iirc something came out a few years back about this. That's when I stopped going to RT for any info.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago

Well, it is a PR firm. Sounds like they were just doing their job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkCRsatApVA