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The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes

• caractacus 3y ago
  captainrenaultshocked.gif
  • inanutshellus 3y ago
    "I expected this, and it can't be helped." messaging implies to readers that those who would try to stop it are the ostracized out-group. Among all the possible reactions to news of corruption (of any sort) I've come to the opinion that humorous-resignation normalizes corruption and is, therefore, just as corrupt. In fact, if I were a bad guy, I'd hire people to leave comments of "The system is broken", "This is normal", "Everyone does it", "There's no way to stop it", and rebuff anyone that proposes solutions. "[Your solution] won't be enough because..."
    • javajosh 3y ago
      I like this articulation. I might modify it slightly because you have, in turn, implied that posters are gaslighting the reader. When, in fact, they are merely exposing a defense mechanism. They say that every pessimist is a dissappointed optimist, and something similar has happened here. It is pitiful cowardice, and an unwitting collaboration with the corrupt, rather than an intentional one. In the end, they need a scolding that will perhaps shame them into remembering they have a backbone. But I suggest that imprecision with the scold will reduce the efficacy of this bitter medicine, and the poster will focus on the minor inaccuracy of your analysis compare it with their own pure intent, dismissing the scold as bad faith. If instead you note that it is cowardice, and add a spoonful of pity to the scold, and remove the minor inaccuracy, it may have a greater effect.
      • inanutshellus 3y ago
        I suspect you and @matheusmoreira are making the same point. It's not a thought I've articulated before... Perhaps, as I've said in the sibling-post, saying they're "complicit in the corruption" is better...
    • matheusmoreira 3y ago
      > just as corrupt I generally agree with you but not on that point. I don't blame people for checking out. Fighting the wrongness of the world is just extremely tiresome. At some point, people change themselves instead. They stop trying to fruitlessly change things and move on with their lives, often with the goal to make a ton of money so they can isolate themselves from the rotten society. Sometimes the only healthy way to react to something is to laugh at the absurdity of it as if you were a sociopathic Joker. It's a coping mechanism for dealing with an imperfect unfixable reality.
      • inanutshellus 3y ago
        Putting effort* into normalizing disenfranchisement is propaganda for the bad guys. That's my personal revelation. But to your point, perhaps "just as corrupt" should have been "are, surprisingly, complicit in that corruption". * "Effort" in this case being "going to the effort of posting". Be checked out? Sure. Being checked out is not my argument. Instead, being engaged-but-jaded and thus broadcasting "corruption is normal" (and thus penalizing corruption is "weird") is /itself/ corrupting.
  • chongli 3y ago
    Everyone knows there’s a lot of corruption out there. It’s overwhelmingly tempting to adopt an attitude of cynicism and essentially shut down when we hear about it. This is a dangerous and unproductive response, even though it’s a natural one [1]. Now you might respond that there’s so much corruption in the world and you, as an individual, can’t do much to stop it all. That’s probably true! However, the power and the great benefit of living in a free, democratic society (I’m assuming you live in a western or otherwise free country, otherwise you may have bigger concerns than review payola on Rotten Tomatoes) is that individuals are free to act and to hold people accountable when they abuse their power. Maybe this issue isn’t that important to you and that’s fine, but maybe some other issue actually is really important to you. What I’m getting at with this long-winded post is simple: try directing your efforts toward one thing you care about and see if you can make a difference, even in one small way. It can go a long way to help you feel more effective and engaged in society! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
    • caractacus 3y ago
      How on EARTH you go from 'sardonic comment about a pointless movie review site' to "gosh, you really should try and make a difference to something in your life!" is as patronising a take as I'll ever hear. also this: "(I’m assuming you live in a western or otherwise free country, otherwise you may have bigger concerns than review payola on Rotten Tomatoes)" ... is simply hilarious, implying that 'western or otherwise free' countries don't have anything more important than messed up film reviews for me to want to change.
• HideousKojima 3y ago
  >The PR firm, named Bunker 15, is said to pay as much as $50.00 for a single Rotten Tomatoes review. The article makes it sound like this is how much the firm is paying members of the official critics pool for reviews, not ordinary users. If $50 is the upper bound for how much they can get paid then journalism must be an even more terrible career than I already thought.
  • brucethemoose2 3y ago
    Written news is indeed hellish now. I don't know how niche outlets are even making it, even with large fractions of pure SEO "pay the bills" articles.
  • robertlagrant 3y ago
    It's not the upper bound of how much they can get paid for journalism. It's the lower bound of what Bunker 15 will pay people who happen to be on Rotten Tomatoes as official reviewers for reviews.
  • layer8 3y ago
    Many more people have a talent and inclination for writing movie reviews than the number of movies coming out, and with the internet there is little barrier to entry anymore, so that outcome isn’t surprising.
• tgv 3y ago
  Reviews have incentives, so crowd sourcing them is broken, in principle. You can try to monitor the reviewers, and put punishments and bans in place, or just pay them to do your job for you.
  • sph 3y ago
    Seems like something a protocol could solve, not a company or a single person that can be easily bought. Crowd sourcing is not the problem, if no one can control the aggregated result. A decentralised rating system would work really nicely on something like nostr. You still have the issue of spam to solve, but that's a larger, orthogonal issue.
    • shadowgovt 3y ago
      Attaching a reputation to each critic and weighting their opinion on it could work. Critics would be loathe to be discovered taking money if it dropped their ability to influence aggregate ranking (and those who send the money would be loathe to send it if sending it made it worthless).
      • mitchdoogle 3y ago
        Isn't this basically how rotten tomatoes works?
        • ryathal 3y ago
          It used to, the professional critics were mostly just those that were paid by newspapers or similar. Lately as in the last few years the gates were opened to basically anyone with a blog viewed by more than their parents. This let everything be manipulated much more easily.
• testplzignore 3y ago
  $50? Even Congresspeople can't be bribed that cheaply. Great return on investment.
  • Simulacra 3y ago
    Wrong. You can go to a lot of fundraisers by members of Congress for only $50. And they will absolutely listen and treat you like you are the most important person on earth.
    • davidktr 3y ago
      So could we get members of Congress to write positive RT reviews?
    • dwighttk 3y ago
      Sure but they won’t (okay… extremely rarely)switch a vote based on that $50
      • BeFlatXIII 3y ago
        You don't pay the $50 to change a vote; you pay it to be the first to plant the idea of which way they should vote on a new issue. The next guy is gonna have to pay a lot more to change it.
        • hgsgm 3y ago
          The sponsors already paid.
• ARandomerDude 3y ago
  The most shocking part to me is that this is "news." It's like saying "Exclusive: there are fake reviews on Amazon!" Companies depend on good reviews to make sales, so dishonest companies and reviewers see mutual benefit in purchasing dishonest reviews. It's a frustrating but old problem.
  • tw04 3y ago
    Sure, but it's also illegal to knowingly participate. The stuff on Amazon largely skates by because the products being reviewed and the businesses selling them aren't under US jurisdiction. PR firms paying for reviews on RT on the other hand don't have that luxury...
    • dwaltrip 3y ago
      Very interesting, didn’t know that was illegal. What US law would it violate to buy a review on Rotten Tomatoes?
  • mitchdoogle 3y ago
    People like Rotten Tomatoes. It's a trusted source of information. If you know of widespread review manipulation then that IS news because it affects how people perceive the site and it's trustworthiness. In this particular case, RT's response is commensurate with what you'd expect of an organization that takes their reputation seriously. There's nothing here that indicates this is the normal state of affairs
    • deleted 3y ago
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• pelagicAustral 3y ago
  What a shocker... It's been a while since I cared about reviews on products or services... the only amusing iteration of the whole 'review' system was done by Vice while ago, they used to send this reporter to go to the worst reviewed X business in a certain area and review it himself... Very funny stuff indeed. 'One Star Reviews' it was called... even then, it wasn't like these places were being properly judged... On a side note, a lot of people missed the chance to watch a show called Review, which is too damn good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_(TV_series) go watch it.
  • civilitty 3y ago
    I will never forgive the producer, James Urbaniak, for what he did to Forrest’s marriage.
    • pelagicAustral 3y ago
      haha oh yeah.. that was something else. My favorite episode will forever be 'Road rage'
    • Sebb767 3y ago
      Would you mind explaining what happened?
      • pelagicAustral 3y ago
        It will completely spoil the episode, but if you want read about it, the episode is titled "Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes" (https://nerdist.com/article/andy-daly-talks-pancakes-divorce-pancakes-review/ https://nerdist.com/article/andy-daly-talks-pancakes-divorce...)
        • woobar 3y ago
          One of the best episodes of that show. Second Pancakes review? Genius!
  • 3y ago
• Simulacra 3y ago
  All review sites can be purchased, it doesn't matter what it is. Any platform where there is an up or down vote by Internet users is almost certainly, if not mostly, disingenuous. No review site should be trusted.
• jasonlotito 3y ago
  On Reviews Find reviewers who agree with your tastes, and who like the things you enjoy. Follow them. Ignore the metacritic-like sites. This is especially useful for games. Which is why it boggles my mind when people get upset at reviewers. Reviewers are not reviewing for everyone. Rather, they are reviewing for their readers. It's okay to disagree. It just means this persons tastes are different for yours. The problem is people forgot how to use reviewers, and instead, just see them as weapons in a the game of "highest metacritic score." It's silly. Find the reviewers you agree with most of the time. Find several, listen to all of them, and make your judgement from that. Ignore the masses.
  • phpisthebest 3y ago
    The problem normally lies in the fact that there is not much diversity of thought when ti comes to reviews... Most of them are in the same or select few cities, all have the same socio-economic backgrounds, all have the same political leanings, so all pretty much look at the world the same, and thus look at their entertainment the same they are borg... So today I have found it useful to look at bad reviews, and the worst reviews the critics have for something the more likely it is I will enjoy it...
  • hcurtiss 3y ago
    It's a lot of work to find them. It would be neat if there were a site where I could rate a number of movies and then it offers to me a critic or critics I could follow who generally share my tastes.
    • darekkay 3y ago
      That's what criticker.com does. It even has an IMDb import to sync your ratings.
    • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
      I'd love this. Recommendation algorithms felt magical in the beginning, but I feel they're getting worse each year. They're getting manipulated by private interests or outright bought, and even when they're successful at remaining impartial they often get stuck in feedback loops. I don't want to keep listening to music that sounds just like what I've been listening to - I want to hear new and different things. Human curation seems to be the only way out, but it can be so unergonomic. I don't really want to watch no-name movie reviewers on YouTube for hours until I find some I agree with. I don't want to read rambling blog posts to figure out whether or not someone liked a film. The ideal flow for me would be: rate a handful of films, then it provides a list of curators that I can choose to follow. Each curator has a list of films that they've endorsed ("you should check this out, for this reason").
• gustavus 3y ago
  You're telling me that the huge disparity between Audience and Critics reviews on RT isn't because the unenlightened masses are to stupid to realize what a cinematic masterpiece <insert preferred culture war movie> was? Well color me shocked, absolutely shocked.
  • mitchdoogle 3y ago
    In my experience the scores are not usually that far apart (< 20 points or so let's say). In the instances that it is far apart, the differences are usually easy to articulate. Critics appreciate and notice technical aspects of films more than average viewers, and are quicker to recognize cliches and tropes. This can lead to movies having much higher audience scores than critic scores, which flies in the face of the notion that critics are getting paid.
• sph 3y ago
  Rotten Tomatoes, owned by Warner Bros. and NBC, part of Fandango Media, a movie ticketing company. One would have to work hard to prove they were NOT biased in the first place, or at least since 2011 when they sold out to the movie industry. FYI, the other big name in movie reviews, IMDb, has been owned by Amazon since 1998 (color me surprised, I didn't know it had been this long until I checked on Wikipedia), and they also had their own streaming service, IMDb TV, now called Amazon Freevee.
  • darkwizard42 3y ago
    Maybe less in the review scene but Amazon through IMDB also bought BoxOfficeMojo which was such a nice and easy UI to see how movies were performing box office wise...
    • nebula8804 3y ago
      Have you looked at the-numbers.com? It is 2000s UX but sometimes that is quite functional. Especially the compare feature which seems like its generating the charts on demand but is quite nice to use.
  • kwanbix 3y ago
    I dunno. For me rotten tomatoes is always closer to my taste than any other, including IMDb.
  • foobarian 3y ago
    Huh. That makes the X-Ray feature in the Prime Video UI make a lot more sense to me now...
    • ramraj07 3y ago
      The XRay feature is impressive and yet totally not worth whatever effort they’re putting. I’d rather they put this effort into tuning their UI Ux.
      • 3y ago
• yellow_lead 3y ago
  Isn't this illegal? The FCC should investigate. These 'reviews' are paid sponsorships which need to be disclosed.
  • junofan 3y ago
    You can certainly hope the FCC takes action to protect the integrity of reviews of Ophelia, a feminist retelling of Hamlet starring Daisy Ridley…
    • causi 3y ago
      Is that a real thing? I don't get the appeal of these "what if this historical story was created now instead of hundreds of years ago" genre.
      • jncfhnb 3y ago
        Guess you don’t like Hamlet either then, which is a reinvented Amleth. I struggle to see how the gp here can still be so bothered by the “feminist” film that did just a couple hundred thousand in the box office five years ago personally. That is a tiny drop in the bucket.
        • junofan 3y ago
          I’m not bothered. I don’t think the FCC will prioritize it.
          • jncfhnb 3y ago
            Because it was a tiny film from five years ago that was neither critically nor financially successful despite 8 reviewers being offered $50. I just can’t fathom why you felt compelled to reference it and the fact that it was “feminist”
            • junofan 3y ago
• phpisthebest 3y ago
  Jokes on them, if the critics think a movie is bad then i will watch it, movie that has a 100% fresh score from critics goes on my never watch list... the User Reviews seem to be more accurate but RT does manipulate them as well citing "view botting" for any trends that do not match their desired outcome from a film
  • londons_explore 3y ago
    One way to void this is for RT to give you a custom score for each movie of how much you will like it. They would generate that score by looking at other things you have rated, finding ~100 other users who have voted similarly to you, and then showing the scores that those other users thought of each movie you are thinking of watching. This is much harder to bot, since you will only see the botted scores if you yourself vote like a bot.
    • ghostpepper 3y ago
      I hope they don’t use the same algorithm that Netflix uses because apparently there are tons of awful movies on Netflix that I am 87% likely to enjoy.
      • londons_explore 3y ago
        Just watch a few of them and give them bad ratings and the algorithm will adjust to know you better.
        • phpisthebest 3y ago
          Or they can just bring back the Rating system, and let users provide feedback to other users.... Instead of trying to hide that because they do not like the feedback some users give their "original content"
      • mcpackieh 3y ago
        Netflix streaming only has a few thousand movies in the first place, the odds of them being able to give more than a few dozen good recommendations to anybody is pretty bad. And for people with particular tastes, the odds will be even worse. Their catalogue is simply too small.
• bluedays 3y ago
  I’ve been wondering for a while if a Nate Silver like system of rating critics might be a better approach. Then you might get a more accurate accounting of critical reviews.
  • a-r-t 3y ago
    538 compares polling data against actual election results. What are you going to compare a critic's ratings against? If you compare them to the average critic or audience rating for a given movie, you will end up with a system that punishes any independent thought.
    • jandrese 3y ago
      Box office draw? Or maybe the "legs" (how long a movie stays in the theater). You would need to adjust for movie type though, you wouldn't want to directly compare an independent documentary on an obscure subject vs. Disney's latest Marvel movie with a 500 million dollar marketing budget.
      • a-r-t 3y ago
        A lot of great movies bombed at the box office. Marketing plays a big role.
    • HDThoreaun 3y ago
      Probably the users listed movie preferences
  • dragonwriter 3y ago
    > I’ve been wondering for a while if a Nate Silver like system of rating critics might be a better approach Critics aren't a proxy or predictor of some objectively verifiable outcome. If you want something useful for you, you could vuild a model with your ratings of movies you've seen, then then takes critics ratings of those movies to build a model of the relationship between individual critics ratings (in isolation or combination) and predicted ratings for you, but other than that you'd just be rating how well one proxy for “will I like it” matches a different proxy.
• tlogan 3y ago
  I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here! Review sites can still be helpful. Even though many reviews might be paid for, you can usually spot them if you read carefully. And then you can focus on the genuine reviews.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• purpleblue 3y ago
  I'm sorry but is anyone surprised? I haven't trust reviews in a long, long time. I'll take a look every now and then knowing they are largely fake and with an agenda. But to be shocked that some critics are being paid is pretty laughable in this day and age.
• goodbyesf 3y ago
  No shit. What's next? PR firms pay reddit power users to push ads and propaganda on the subs they control? If PR firms can pay the nytimes to sell war, surely they are capable of buying a few positive reviews for movies. Yelp is the last straw for me. If yelp reviews are found to be bought and sold, I'll lose all faith in social media and the reviews ecosystem. If we can't trust yelp, then who can we trust?
• hgsgm 3y ago
  RT is an industry shill site, fine. Worse is that Web Search Engines promote it as authoritative gospel.
• CyberDildonics 3y ago
  Fandango owns rotten tomatoes and warner brothers owns a minority stake in fandango. Also anyone with a little cynicism who watches movies is probably not shocked by this. There has been a lot of positive review inflation over time and there are other tricks like having a score for 'critics' and a separate score for 'top critics'. Then there is question of if the review they post was actually positive or not. There are plenty of ways to bend and play games with their system and the seem to do it. Just like yelp 'does not delete bad reviews' if you pay them, they just get relegated to a hard to find page and not counted.
• crmd 3y ago
  In the old days I trusted Siskel and Ebert for movie reviews the way I now trust guys like Project Farm and Jeff Geerling for product reviews. We are born with pretty good 1:1 bullshit detectors, and exceptionally credible people easily earn my trust. Aggregated review platforms like rotten tomatoes and Amazon are just garbage.
  • hoppyhoppy2 3y ago
    https://rogerebert.com https://rogerebert.com is still up and running and their staff is still writing reviews for new films. It's one of my go-to sources for film reviews.
    • DHPersonal 3y ago
      Once Ebert died I largely stopped visiting that site. Do you feel that they still hold opinions largely similar to what Ebert would have if he was still alive?
      • hoppyhoppy2 3y ago
        I don't know; I discovered it after he died and have been using it mainly for post-Ebert reviews. I'm actually not super familiar with his taste in films.
      • darkerside 3y ago
        It's never been the same for me. I didn't always agree with his opinion, but he always articulated it beautifully, and I could respect it. Critics these days seem like they're just churning out more content.
    • abruzzi 3y ago
      to me the trick is finding one or two reviewers that you understand (not necessarily agree with.) Then if the person says they dislike something and why, you can compare their history with your history of agreeing or disagreeing with them. When Ebert was alive, I had read (and saw) enough of his reviews to have that kind of reaction. For example, I knew Ebert hated David Lynch, and I understood (to an extent) why and I knew that I disagreed on the reasons, so I could filter his reviews. Other people writing on Eberts site don't give me that. That's something you don't get with aggregators.
• o1y32 3y ago
  Ever since I discovered that some reviews used in rotten tomatoes are unscripted YouTube videos, in the sense that the reviewer just talks about a movie however their thoughts lead them without any organization, I stopped paying attention to rotten tomato scores. I am sure a lot of people prefer a video review to a carefully written and edited nytimes review (as an actual article), but that's not for me.
• generalizations 3y ago
  Not really surprising, this is just confirmation of what's been apparent for a while - Audience score is an accurate estimate of the movie, and the tomatometer (the critic score) basically just reflects the political correctness / marketing budget of the movie.
  • Frannyies 3y ago
    For me the critic score is a 'is this valuable as a cultural enrichment of movies' vs 'do people like it'. What you do with information is than your decision. Best case you know and trust your critics because you align to a certain degree with their experience and movie taste. For example "now you see me" is a shit movie. Magic in a movie doesn't work and the main hidden character basically breaks the whole movie but apparently the audience loved it.
    • willcipriano 3y ago
      > is this valuable as a cultural enrichment of movies The Last Jedi is apparently the cultural enrichment film of the decade. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_last_jedi https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_last_jedi
      • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
        Rotten tomatoes scores aren't an average of a bunch of vectors, they're an aggregation of binary data points. Each individual review is distilled down to "good" (100%) or "rotten" (0%), then they're all averaged up. A better way to view the critic score is, "X% of film critics think this film is worth watching." And the audience score is: "Y% of moviegoers who leave movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes think this film is worth watching." This is why Toy Story can get 99% (it's a crowd pleaser), and why daring, impactful films can sometimes get lower scores (they can be polarizing).
        • smsm42 3y ago
          Worth watching for whom though? The critics have no idea what my tastes are. But I am pretty sure they are different from a film critic - I don't even know anyone who is a film critic or who knows anyone who is a film critic (and is not afraid to admit it). And from all evidence available, those critics by now are mostly into the business of shilling for studios, virtue signalling and sniffing their own farts. Why would I care what this bunch thinks is worth watching? If they want to watch it, let them, but it has nothing to do with me.
• justinpombrio 3y ago
  Well that could explain The Rings of Power getting 83% on Rotten Tomatoes. I certainly can't think of any other explanation.
  • Ekaros 3y ago
    I kinda understand the big movie titles. You want to get the early access and pre-screenings... So you cannot be too critical. But streaming shows? Or maybe they ban Amazon accounts...
  • aleksiy123 3y ago
    Rotten Tomatoes calculates critics score and audience score differently. 83% of critics gave it a positive review on a binary scale. Not an average rating of 83%. Whereas 38% of audience gave it higher than 3.5 stars. They aren't exactly comparable.
    • didntcheck 3y ago
      And this is why I'm still salty about Youtube switching from star ratings to binary like/dislike (and everyone else then following the leader), over 10 years ago
  • mitchdoogle 3y ago
    It seems to me like fans of LotR decided before it even came out that they didn't like it and have brigaded platforms with negative reviews. Maybe its not even a conscious effort. Lots of people dislike Amazon. And lots of the fans disliked the whole notion of turning this content into a show. I think that has colored the reaction to the show among the public while critics can usually take a more objective view
    • Timon3 3y ago
      I've seen a couple of critiques on it, and they all seem to be well-founded. How do you differentiate between "decided before it even came out that they didn't like it" and "have real grievances that support their view of the show"?
• nowooski 3y ago
  The FTC is actually in the process of finalizing new regulations that would target abuses like these. Unfortunately, they only apply to the united states so will likely have little effect. This post goes into why the FTC's proposed regulations are likely to fail. https://www.perfectrec.com/posts/why-the-ftcs-new-fake-review-regulations-wont-work https://www.perfectrec.com/posts/why-the-ftcs-new-fake-revie...
  • downWidOutaFite 3y ago
    link that worked for me https://www.perfectrec.com/posts/why-the-ftcs-fake-review-regulations-wont-work https://www.perfectrec.com/posts/why-the-ftcs-fake-review-re...
• Ekaros 3y ago
  Only shocking thing about this is that it only posted now... Not years ago.
• andreygrehov 3y ago
  Isn't that how the entire world rolling? There was even a website to buy upvotes on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27580387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27580387 (looks like dead now). Luckily, because of the nature of the HN community, buying upvotes here is the silliest marketing strategy. The community smells bullshit from thousand miles.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• bigbacaloa 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • dang 3y ago
    "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." (especially nationalistic ones please) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: unfortunately your account has been breaking the site guidelines so badly and so frequently that I think we have to ban it. We simply can't have users posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37381905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37381905. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
• Sparkyte 3y ago
  A lot of people pay for reviews. Movies are no different from video games and other stuff. You quickly find out who is paid to win when the whole media under review is quite opposite of the review itself.
• free_glamorgan 3y ago
  The state of Rotten Tomatoes turned out to be a very accurate bellwether for the state of the (US-centric) movie industry in general. It really is a shame what happened to one of the little bastions of human-centric freedom of expression and opinion.
• roamerz 3y ago
  Problem is for sites that do this is that users quickly find out. The last 2 movies I went and saw based on RT ratings were crap. I had noticed a downward trend on accuracy and now this makes sense. RT had a much diminished value to me now.
• jl6 3y ago
  > The site responded by delisting a variety of Bunker 15 films from their website. I wonder if we can find out which films these were. Interesting that the punishment was applied to the films, not to the critics.
• Etrnl_President 3y ago
  But the news told me only negative reviews are fake. How do they explain that?
• wly_cdgr 3y ago
  From the article: "Audiences are dumber" - Paul Schrader. Lol, fuck you too, buddy.
  • isk517 3y ago
    Yeah, also 'Normal people don’t go through reviews like they used to.' No kidding, normal people don't spend a hour reading reviews before they decide to watch a 90 minute movie on the streaming service of their choice.
    • tgv 3y ago
      That used to be a 3 minute job, but hey, who wants to pay for quality journalism when you can get garbage for free?
      • trwaw 3y ago
        [flagged]
• rfwhyte 3y ago
  Chinese and Indian film studios have been doing this for years on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. So many absolutely abysmal Chinese and Indian movies have 90%+ user scores on both platforms, it's painfully obvious to anyone even paying a modicum of attention that they're gaming these sites, as there's no way thousands of people can all think these utter turd movies / shows are actually gems regardless of whatever cultural relativism based excuses people try and trot out. The bottom line is basically every single site that aggregates reviews or has user reviews is functionally useless now, as there are entire multi-billion dollar industries employing tens of thousands of people in China, India, Russia and the Philippines devoted to flooding the sites with fake reviews and the sites themselves know this all to well and do nothing to stop is as they make more money this way.
• at_a_remove 3y ago
  Didn't they just throw out a bunch of reviews when the audience didn't care for it but the people in charge wanted a good showing? The shadow of the Butcher's Thumb looms large. I've started to see it more and more. Everyone wants to put their sticky digits on the scale to push it in the direction they like. Film reviews, product testing, the news ... and there's so many ways they can do it: the "window" of the data, deciding what is an outlier, and so on. I get to feeling paranoid when I look into it.
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  Up a level: any notion of a "score" for a movie is inherently BS. The box office totals are there, if you want a score. Pick one or two critics you know & respect, read them, and decide for yourself if you might like that film.
  • mcpackieh 3y ago
    You're right of course, but reading a review takes time and learning which reviewers have tastes aligned with your own takes even more time. The entire premise of Rotten Tomatoes is to give people a simple number they can read in a second. Personally I disregard both RT and published reviews (I've never found a reviewer who aligns with me) and go off word-of-mouth from my circle of friends and family. But I think that doesn't work for everybody either.
  • singleshot_ 3y ago
    Under this methodology, the best film in history was Avatar.
    • AlbertCory 3y ago
      I didn't even name any critics, so how would you derive that?
      • mlyle 3y ago
        He's responding to "The box office totals are there, if you want a score."
        • AlbertCory 3y ago
          Misunderstanding it, though. I didn't say you should go by them.
          • mlyle 3y ago
            If you say it's a possible figure of merit, don't be expected when people point out problems in that figure of merit or say why it's even less suited for purpose than RT and MC.
• SlightlyLeftPad 3y ago
  This practice is now called “Search Engine Optimization.” Right?
• chaostheory 3y ago
  No surprise. The more power is concentrated, the higher the chance of corruption. This is a weakness of centralizing anything
• gcau 3y ago
  Not only the critic reviews, but the audience reviews are botted too.
• Exuma 3y ago
  Now that's a great cover photo for a blog post... vivid.
• Simulacra 3y ago
  I once knew a guy who would never see a movie unless it had a high Tomatoes score. He was a marketing manager for US News, which makes this article hilarious.
• timetraveller26 3y ago
  How could AI improve this? /s
• hindsightbias 3y ago
  I wish the Pitch Meeting channel guy would do second-tier movies. He’s saved me a lot of money.
• smiley1437 3y ago
  To me, RT turning to shit is just Goodhart's Law in action - "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" Originally, RT was more or less a 'good faith' measurement of the general sentiment\quality of a film, but it is so easily manipulated it was inevitable that it would become meaningless.
  • deaddodo 3y ago
    Which became more and more obvious with the plethora of examples today of disconnected Audience and Critic scores. While they definitely measure on different metrics, the goal of a critic is supposed to be to measure films worth watching (even if only for a subset of the total audience). When 95% of critics tell you to see a movie that only 10% of people enjoy, something's broken.
    • GauntletWizard 3y ago
      There are plenty of things that are worth doing that people often don't enjoy - Exercise, eating healthy, etc. Critics job is sometimes to tell you if you'll enjoy a movie. It's not the only job and it's not the only reason movies are made.
      • deaddodo 3y ago
        > Critics job is sometimes to tell you if you'll enjoy a movie. It's not the only job and it's not the only reason movies are made. I believe I addressed this. I specifically mentioned that they have different metrics so you wouldn't expect it to fully lineup. It's the drastic disconnect that is the problem. If critics love a movie but literally no one else does, what are they seeing? Or, more directly, what is the point of me putting any validity into their words?
    • taberiand 3y ago
      On the other hand, children generally love ice cream and hate broccoli. They'll eat so much ice-cream that it makes them sick. It depends on what you mean by "worth watching".
• cs702 3y ago
  Silly me, being on HN I clicked on this expecting to see something like a Singular Value Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes ratings. Sigh. I read the OP anyway. It's worth reading. The short of it is that movie studios and their unscrupulous apparatchiks are paying less prominent movie critics to keep negative reviews out of view of Rotten Tomatoes, for example, by publishing those negative reviews in a separate, more obscure blog. Personally, I now trust only the reviews of a handful of movie critics whose reviews have proven to be reliable over the years.
  • chankstein38 3y ago
    I was, for some reason, expecting it was a paper about tomatoes decomposing after they rot. lol
  • dfxm12 3y ago
    On vulture.com? It would be silly to expect that article from the entertainment magazine.
    • cs702 3y ago
      Oh the domain name is the last thing I read. It's all the way to the right!
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • sumtechguy 3y ago
    > handful of movie critics whose reviews have proven to be reliable over the years. Even then I still make my own decision on it. I have been surprised by a few movies I thought were just fine/horrible but my favorite reviewers disliked/liked it.
• MichaelMoser123 3y ago
  every online platform is going down the drain, including HN. We got a very adversarial and uniform style of discussions, lately. Commenting here feels like submitting a pull request.
  • steve_adams_86 3y ago
    The correct term is "merge request", FYI. Please update your comment to use this terminology. If you don't have time to, I'll just fork it.
  • l33t7332273 3y ago
    I’m aware that most sources say it doesn’t matter, but I think this comment would be easier to read with two spaces after each period so I’m not going to accept your comment it until you change it to appease me.
• legitster 3y ago
  Honestly, all review aggregates are kind of trash. It's crazy that we have stuck with either binary or 5 star ratings this whole time across the internet. I had a product idea I have yet to make where you replace ratings with rankings. Instead of giving something a 1-5 review, you just answer a few quick questions whether something is better or worse than a listed alternative. You aggregate enough rankings and you can give everything a percentile score. The number is actually meaningful - a 70% means people on average think that it's 70% better than all ranked alternatives. And you can't lie or influence a ranking as easily. "You think Rings of Power is a good show? Okay, but are you are actually going to rank it above The Sopranos?"
  • passwordoops 3y ago
    I love this idea and put it in practice (sort of) when working on prioritization. For example, say we want 15 features done, I compare feature A to the other fourteen asking "If I can only do A or X, which would I do?" with the winner earning a point, kind of like a Round Robin tournament. Then do the same for the rest on down and tally up the scores. Hasn't failed me yet and if you do it as an org it helps with arguments down the line
  • hi_im_vijay 3y ago
    that's a sweet product idea, you should prototype it :)
  • speedgoose 3y ago
    The French senscritique.com has a lot of community made ranked lists. They are a nice alternative to the classic ratings.
  • mfenniak 3y ago
    I like that idea quite a bit. I wonder if there's an algorithm that doesn't get completely screwed up by circles... since it is subjective, A > B > C > A is a valid input and shouldn't cause a complete algorithmic failure.
    • FartyMcFarter 3y ago
• DrThunder 3y ago
  RT does stink but their diagnosis as to why is hilariously wrong. It stinks because they DO try to put verified "critics" above the general public. I had to laugh at this - "Every review carries the same weight whether it runs in a major newspaper or a Substack with a dozen subscribers." Yeah, and that's a good thing. Why should subscriber base give your review more weight? I can read that individual's review if I want to know what they think, I don't need to get a higher weight for the total review from everyone. Then this was just as laughable - "Misogynist trolls had hijacked the platform, coordinating to tank women-led movies like Captain Marvel before they opened." No, it was an objectively BAD movie with an actress that acts like a stiff unenthused robot delivering her lines. In conclusion, this author thinks RT needs be fixed because it's not reflecting his bias that the movie industry needs to be more "inclusive" and no movie that includes that "inclusivity" ought to ever receive a poor rating because obviously all of those ratings are racist, misogynist, -ist this, -ist that etc. Here's my prescription: Just watch the movies and make your own mind up. If you have to go to a site like RT, ignore the critic reviews completely because almost all live in a bubble and can't relate with common movie goers.
• say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
  RT reviewers brigade against Dave Chappelle every single time. Because of this, I don't trust RT scores at all.
• tbbfjotllf 3y ago
  This is not the Rotten Tomatoes I was expecting but I'm not complaining.
• ernestipark 3y ago
  Rotten tomatoes is actually very useful if you know the magic formula: * If tomatometer & audience score are within 5% of each other, you can trust the ratings to give you a decent indiciation of movie quality. * If tomatometer is more than 15%+ higher than audience score, it means it's an artsy fartsy movie that critics like and movies don't. * If audience score is 15%+ higher than tomatometer, it's a fun movie even if it's not oscar worthy. (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/old_school https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/old_school is a perfect example)
  • banannaise 3y ago
    This completely ignores both the primary subject of the article (astroturfed "critic" reviews) and another phenomenon mentioned (review brigading, particularly one-star reviews from right-wing trolls).
    • dylan604 3y ago
      The Last Temptation of Christ was my first experience with the right-wing/religious uproar about a movie was as a teen still keeping peace with the parental units by attending mom's church. At the time, I really had no interest in seeing the movie, but not because the preacher man said not to. Just wasn't my thing. However, it was very eye opening on the weaponization of the pulpit and only accelerated my move away from church.
  • munchler 3y ago
    These days IMDb user reviews are the most reliable source. It’s easy to scan a few dozen to see what most people think and discard outliers if you want. The wisdom of crowds is unmatched.
    • voytec 3y ago
      Funny that iMDb is owned by Amazon and their retail platform is infested with counterfeit products and filled with reviews not worth looking at.
• squidsoup 3y ago
  I generally don't like social media, but Letterboxd is an excellent alternative to review aggregators, as you can find individuals with similar tastes to yourself. I've found many films I've greatly enjoyed via my Letterboxd network that I would not have otherwise.
  • gochi 3y ago
    For now. The same thing that happened to GoodReads will also happen to Letterboxd. Nobody wants to pay for a service like that to stay true to form in the long term.
    • squidsoup 3y ago
      Interesting, I haven't used GoodReads for years. Has it become compromised in some way by the Amazon acquisition?
      • spoiler 3y ago
        I'd like to know this too! I only casually use it to find books I might like. So far I've not noticed anything changed since Amazon acquired it (didn't even realise they did, in fact)
    • jamespullar 3y ago
      There's already plenty of group think with certain films. More and more very recently released, popular films are shooting up to the highest rated within a few days. Letterboxd should probably account for the recency bias a bit better.
      • squidsoup 3y ago
        Right, which is why I think there's more value in finding a couple of individuals whose tastes resonate with your own, and watch their favourite things, rather than pay attention to aggregated scores.
      • pallas_athena 3y ago
• darklycan51 3y ago
  I always knew this was the case, it was a huge hunch I had from the Spiderman/Venom fiasco. Was Amazing Spiderman incredible? no it was far from it, was Venom 1 good? it was good except the last fight, literally. Yet its rating was 30%. (audience 80%) Morbius as much as I hated the actor personally, I liked the movie, it felt like spiderman 1 in a way, the cinematic shots were better than anything Marvel has done in years. Yet they all get horribly rated, Black Adam was I felt, good, more interesting and better CGI than literally every Marvel movie since maybe endgame, yet it was critically butchered. NOBODY can tell me that Disney doesn't weaponize critics. (For people who do not get it, review bombing Sony produced Marvel movies made them do worse at box office which in turn made Sony or forced Sony to give the rights back to Marvel).
  • ryathal 3y ago
    Disney is definitely active in shaping narratives on Rotten Tomatoes. The best example is probably The Last Jedi, which has had several people document the removal of negative reviews multiple times.
• slowhadoken 3y ago
  Word of mouth among friends with similar taste is still king. Otherwise it’s trial and error.
• miamibre 3y ago
  For me the the only review service that is worth any salt is for video games and it's Steam Reviews -Requires the reviewer to actually own / play the game -Highlights the amount of time played so you can easily filter out people who just dismissed -Lets you know who got the game for free or reviewed the game in early access -The magnitude of votes is shown which lets you know if it is a niche title or mainstream blockbuster -Gives you a timeline of votes so you can see changes over time and see if there are any review bomb cycles happening It's not perfect but I find it wild that people think there is any value in these movie review aggregator sites when you can't even verify if the person watched the movie at all and these guys can just spam votes. Worse yet there isn't any incentive for the site to change this since more traffic means more eyeballs for ads.
  • duxup 3y ago
    Netflix when it was just DVDs had amazing community reviews. The quality of reviews was really good.
    • JadeNB 3y ago
      I think a large part of that is that Netflix when it was just DVDs was in the age before systematic review abuse reached its current state of the art, and before it became profitable for companies to participate. Amazon's standout strength used to be its reviews!
      • duxup 3y ago
        I think it helped too that the volume of experienced film enthusiasts who would order dvds early in the Netflix days and write reviews was probably pretty high.
  • TulliusCicero 3y ago
    Other than review bombing as you say, I largely agree. Well, maybe one more caveat: user expectations as they relate to the genre or company. One thing I noticed while browsing the hidden gems list* -- which have games with extremely high ratings -- is that there's a LOT of hidden object games on there. I think there's one cat series that appears like three or four times. And some more conventional genres like RTSes or action RPG's are hardly present at all. I think this is due to expectations: people don't expect a lot out of a hidden object game, they're generally very simple, and a small indie title can easily meet those low expectations. Whereas a genre that has included many big budget titles, people have higher expectations, even larger, highly experienced dev teams have a hard time pleasing everyone. * https://steam250.com/hidden_gems https://steam250.com/hidden_gems
• ajonit 3y ago
  It’s a decade+ long problem asking for a solution. Not just this one site, Amazon, Google etc are littered with fake reviews and none of those companies are concerned. If these companies don’t get their act together soon, I’m sure the Govt of various countries will compel them to do so.
  • lotsofpulp 3y ago
    My solution is to wait for people in my network to bring up that they watched and liked something.
• matt_j 3y ago
  I don't trust anyone to review a film, but I still read/watch reviews. Over the years I've learned to read between the lines a bit and I usually have a gut feeling for how a reviewer and the film in question 'match up'. People that 'hate' art movies are usually wrong. People that 'love' popcorn movies are too. Art movies are nuanced and delicate, so hating it with a 1 star review is too broad of a brush to paint your opinion with. If you don't like art and connecting with humanity, don't watch art movies (peasant). Similarly, popcorn movies are trash (<3) and love is too strong a word. Have fun, be entertained, but if you love The Avengers with all 5 stars you are paper thin. I speak strongly with a smile and fully accept that film is a subjective medium, open to interpretation, and you can go ahead and hate The Royal Tenenbaums if you want, and love The Avengers if you want, but I will take your review with a large grain of salt and you deserve to not to be taken too seriously.
  • 7thaccount 3y ago
    It's been a long time, but I recall the Royal Tenenbaums just confusing me when I was younger (maybe too young) as I couldn't figure out what the point was. I liked the early Marvel movies as they were fun, but I just can't watch them or the shows on Disney+ anymore as I feel like I've hit my saturation point.
• siglesias 3y ago
  I think as a culture we've gotten far too comfortable being complicit in casual corruption, rationalizing that "it's just the way things are." We should remind ourselves that it doesn't need to be this way.
  • nomel 3y ago
    I too enjoy yelling towards the wind of monopolies. With all things social media/crowdsourced, the biggest is the most useful, and the most difficult to influence, and the most funded, by all actors.
  • chinabot 3y ago
    Your right. Your pushed to read or watch the same shit because of "the algorithm" I'm resigned to the fact ninety percent of the content out there I really want probably has no reviews whatsoever and there is nothing I can do about it if I stay in a corporate ecosystem.
  • nonethewiser 3y ago
    > I think as a culture we've gotten far too comfortable being complicit in casual corruption, rationalizing that "it's just the way things are." What do you suggest as an alternative in this scenario with Rotten Tomatoes? Nothing really rides on it. People are widely critical of it. I just don't really see a big problem here.
    • Mistletoe 3y ago
      Truth is its own reason for being, even on something as inconsequential as movie reviews. When a society starts letting the corruption creep in, bad things usually follow.
• arpowers 3y ago
  Let me tell you a story... Years ago a friend of mine in SF started a review site, it gained traction by being fair and balanced. Once the website was a top 1000 site on the internet, my friend started to try and make money with advertising. After a while, he grew dependent on a few select advertisers. Too dependent. While he had built the business with integrity, at some point, he decided to start "helping" his advertisers get better reviews... to build goodwill and keep the checks coming. This is fine, except it undermines the purpose of a review site. This is the time when his traffic plained out and started to decline. I'm sure the same is happening here.
• at_a_remove 3y ago
  I used to do film reviews quasi-professionally. There's zero excuse for bribery, the work is hard enough to perform well as it is. Reviewers have at least three tasks before them. 1) The TV Guide summary, which consists of one or two sentences describing what happens during the film, perhaps a categorization, then some references to the actors wherein based on a scale which multiplies how much time that person is in the film against how famous that person is. The runtime part is easy. Then you have your star rating, which is almost agonizing. This product is used to determine whether or not you will just sort of put something on while you fold laundry. 2) The "do I want to exert effort and/or money seeing this film?" review. This is the most dangerous part. You have no idea who is reading this. How will you know that they will or will not like this movie? Your best bet here is to cover the most objective portions of the film in detail. Your subjective impressions must highlight their subjectivity and point out your own biases. This allows for the "Ebert doesn't really do most horror films well" factor, as well as some of his other quirks. For all that I might disagree, he wore his heart on his sleeve and I could predict which films he might give short shrift. 3) The third product is a monologue, hopefully something which can start a conversation somewhere, about the more abstract businesses of film-making. How has this actor developed over time? Is this a worthy entry in this director's career? Are there rip-offs, allusions, homages, nudges and winks? You can talk about anything which struck you during the film, so long as you leave room to begin a kind of dialogue with someone, somewhere. The best you can hope for is that a reader understands what you have said in your review to the point where they can decide not to see a film you like, or vice versa, because you have sufficiently explained your reaction. I would not call myself a tastemaker, but I am good at, with friends, identifying what they will and will not like, whether or not I care for the film. A great deal of that just comes from examination of my own biases (my turn-ons, my turn-offs, my habits and my aversions). It is a shame, but not especially shocking, at how we have just another clumsy fumble at our wallets and minds.
• karim79 3y ago
  For me RT has mostly been a reasonable indicator of what is worth watching and what isn't, subjective as that might seem. Some stuff though just doesn't make any sense to me (going back to the point about subjectivity). I love the movie The Ninth Gate, and that scores 44% on RT with the critics, and 57% with the audience. I know a lot of people who love it as well. So I thought that the reviews were perhaps influenced by Polanski's history, but then when you look at The Pianist, which came after by quite some years, it scored 95%. So what gives?
• friend_and_foe 3y ago
  Is anyone surprised? Or was this a "consiparcy theory" up til today? All of these review sites, every single one of them, are influence peddlers. All review articles are paid PR. Every single one.
• healsdata 3y ago
  "Audiences are dumber." Says the filmmaker Paul Schrader. Schrader's last half dozen films were rated across the spectrum by critics on RT, middling by audiences, and barely broke even in aggregate. The idea that this is done combination of RT and dumber audiences' fault is a possibility but equally possible is that he just doesn't know how to make movies for modern audiences.
• wodenokoto 3y ago
  In rotten tomatoes defense there aren’t really any commercial reviewers left that don’t work for sponsorships (and it’s not like audience scores are hard to manipulate) Like, what is left for them to aggregate?
• bubblydoops 3y ago
  [flagged]
• brightlancer 3y ago
  I'm shocked, shocked that there is gaming of systems for economic benefit! Obviously, paying to get a positive review or to bury a negative review is cheating and should be treated as such. OTOH, paying to get reviewed honestly is completely OK -- it's how many indie films get noticed. While large studios don't (openly) offer cash, they do entice reviewers with food, drinks, meeting cast & crew, swag, etc. Some reviewers seem to feel pressured, others seem to not give a care. AFAICT, they all keep getting re-invited.
• mhh__ 3y ago
  Just give me a filter to discard the opinions of marvel fans and we're onto something.
• pallas_athena 3y ago
  I don't trust RT scores, I don't trust IMDB scores and I don't trust Metacritic scores. All can be gamed. For non-contemporary movies I trust the Sight&Sound poll [1]. Yes, it's mostly artsy-fartsy movies. I love them. Sure, that can also be gamed, but very much less so: if you are voting you can pick only your top 10 movies ever, and then the next poll is in ten years. It's very difficult to push marketing on it. I can of course see two points of failure still: 1. Since it's Sight&Sound who picks the voters, they could choose only voters that fits their "ideology". I don't see what this ideology could be. Also, most directors are very well-known, and they wouldn't vote for Marvel Movie #19 since the votes are public [2]. 2. A lot of voters could make a deal among themselves to all pick a certain movie. This is in part mitigated by the large numbers of voters, but of course it can happen. Paul Schrader gave a lot of shit online because the #1 movie in the 2022 edition was "Jeanne Dielman". He sees that as "Distorted Woke Reappraisal" [3]. I think he's full of shit, and the S&S Poll is the most credible snapshot of (art?) movies made every 10 years. [1] https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-ti... [2] https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time/all-voters https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-ti... [3] https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/paul-schrader-sight-and-sound-poll-too-woke-1234787868/ https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/paul-schrader-sig...
  • lbriner 3y ago
    To me, it's not about the fact they can be gamed but even the premise is misguided. Unless I trust a particular critic because "I like what they like", then it is like asking everyone what political party they like or which make of car they prefer. Deadpool scored 85% on rotton tomatoes and that makes sense, it was a bit different than the normal "Marvel" films and was well acted but it is totally not something I would enjoy. Napolean Dynamite scored 32% and strictly speaking, it was a very oddball film. I really enjoyed it and there are more than enough quotes in it to still make me laugh over 10 years later. The idea that crowd-sourcing reviews leads to some kind of useful truth is marginal at best but downright wrong.
    • pallas_athena 3y ago
• klabb3 3y ago
  Definitely felt this with IMDB and now also RT. Sometimes it’s political, but more often it seems like new mediocre movies get amazing ratings, which just didn’t add up. For a while, I thought it was just enthusiast bias but it makes more sense that there’s gaming going on. “Foreign” movies very often get shit ratings, especially when they don’t copy-paste the Anglo-Hollywood style and tropes. In either case, my best advice for reviews in general is: take it with a big grain of salt. Ie don’t compare 7.5 with 7.8. Barbie vs Oppenheimer ratings is not gonna tell you anything useful, even if there’s no gaming going on. Never obsess over subjective measurements. Instead, use a 5.2 rating as an indicator that it’s very likely to be bad. But if it’s say a documentary about something you have nerded out on, then it may have you glued to the screen.
• lofaszvanitt 3y ago
  Critics are idiots. These aggregator sites dilute and remove their power and give it to the aggregator site. Critics should ban these aggregator sites alltogether so they could not quote/use their reviews. Critics already had their GPT moment, but they didn't notice it.