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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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a 38% Audience Rating, which should largely be discarded

Funny, I'd say it's the critics' ratings that should be ignored. After all, who do I have more in common with? Who is the show supposed to be made for?

I don't even know why we tolerate critics anymore.

This also bothers me. I'm continuously baffled by how the same people who never shut up about "protecting" "our" "democracy" can still get away with shitting hard on the opinions of the common man. And it seems like there's a large minority of the country who can doublethink this stuff into a coherent ideology. I'm deep enough into conflict theory territory that whenever I read thinga like this I just order more ammo for the day when they inevitably decide that something must be done about the ineducable subhuman underclass.

Here is my heuristic.

Critic Score| Audience Score| Interpretation
Low Low SUCKS
Low Medium Not "highbrow" enough
Low High NOT Woke
Medium Low SUCKS but woke
Medium Medium Mediocre
Medium High Good but not woke enough
High Low WOKE WOKE WOKE WOKE WOKE
High Medium Woke but tolerable
High High AWESOME

If troolean algebra existed, I could have come up with a formula for the above.

Good news!

Unfortunately, I can't tell what's going in for most of that article, so I'll leave constructing those tables as an exercise for the reader.

Which one is more likely to give a dishonest review for financial reasons? Real hard choice figuring out whether to trust normal people watching shows or paid "experts"!

Which one is more likely to give a dishonest review for financial reasons?

Not a fair comparison, since critics are the only side in this comparison likely to get significant financial pay for attaching their name to a corrupted review.

As silly as I find the isolated demands for rigor in terms of which audience ratings we take seriously, the faceless internet mob has shown itself incredibly willing to put out corruptive "reviews" at will too, for basically free. If anything they don't even count as "reviews" since they happen before the work is revealed.

So you're correct, but it may not mean what you think :)

They’re both bad. Critics fall for wokeshit but audiences fall for shitshit. Superhero trash and Black Panther are at the top either way

but audiences fall for shitshit

Audiences have also elevated a ton of great shows in the Golden Age of TV. If anything the American audience is more heterogeneous in its tastes than ever, the problem is that big tentpole films need to cater to the lowest common denominator...globally now.

And, really, a world where the public has a proportional role in determining the media seems preferable to the world in which critics have a disproportionate one. At least, in current, polarized America.

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