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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Add comment