Originally published at: Rotten Tomatoes scores are rigged, according to report | Boing Boing
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But hey—at least we know the audience scores are fair and unbiased, right?
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So basically, once any review site becomes big enough to have a significant influence on the industry/medium it reviews, it becomes payola.
This sounds like it should be a corollary to the website enshittification lifecycle.
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This is nothing new. I always distrusted the Tomatometer. For me a movie had to have at least a high 80’s score to even consider going.
Today the Barbie movie only has an 88% LOLOLOLOL A movie doesn’t get over a Billion Dollar box office take unless it’s very good.
As for Audience score - that’s useless too. 83% because some chads on social media grifted for $$$.
Splat!
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It does sound like it’s some corollary of Goodhart’s Law: Goodhart's law - Wikipedia. Studios want high RT scores, pay to get them, thus the RT scores are meaningless.
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I generally only looked to that site to get a rough gauge on films that might be worth watching outside of the genre stuff I generally watch. I stopped visiting their site frequently several years back when they removed the view that allowed you to quickly scan a long list of films in favor of a tile view. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising their ratings are being gamed–pretty much every review site has that problem.
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I’ve definitely watched a few movies that for the life of me I couldn’t understand how they got such high Rotten Tomatoes scores. Guess now I know. I wonder if this will impact wether or not Apple for instance would continue to prominently place RT scores on the movies splash page/ in their store?
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Oh, so it’s like Storygraph for movies.
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… isn’t that Phase Two, fuck over users to benefit business partners 
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I’m sure if we paid for a movie AFTER we saw it, many of the first 53 on this list… would not be on this list. Top Lifetime Grosses - Box Office Mojo
A good movie is something like Life Of Pi . Instead we get wham bam blam movies like Fast & Furious , the stupider they become the more they make. Never conflate box office with quality.
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Any honest tv show review sites out there?
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For me Rotten Tomatoes aggregated reviews. The number of stars was never as interesting as the way a critic determined them.
I should probably see a movie sometime,
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The Onion’s AV Club is pretty good, but they rate only shows that are already at the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist. They haven’t bothered with the Simpsons for years, for instance. In that sense, it’s a good indicator of what you need to be watching.
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Helpfully,. they use Rotten Tomatoes scores.
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For your mileage maybe, I don’t find that. I enjoyed the Barbie movie but I’m a Greta Gerwig fan for a long time. I typed in “billion dollar movies” into the search engine and of the 24 that came up there was a Toy Story and Frozen that I liked. Not a fan of the rest.
ETA Barbie is the first film I enjoyed in the list linked by @Alvin_Goodman above. At 15. So the first 14 were just not for me.
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