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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38487 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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You're not the first to notice. It seems like IMDB already weighted scores because of review-bombing. On IMDB, even weighted, it's at 7.2. And metacritic's score of 2.2 seems more reflective of what review-bombing might look like, so I'd bet Rottentomatoes put in some extra protections against review-bombing, above and beyond just weighting the score like IMDB. It seems like Rottentomatoes user scores are like Wikipedia articles, if it's political I wouldn't trust it implicitly.

The problem then is, what is review-bombing versus this movie/show really does suck?

I feel like it's a lost cause at this point. Review-bombing is probably real, fake, and irrelevant all at the same time. I say irrelevant because once a review-bombing has been deemed to happen all reviews become tainted because let's assume it's all natural both ways, people will still counter-review bomb to say something is great for culture war reasons or pretend to be the enemy and strawman their position. I'm beginning to believe the latter is very likely, if not predestined, to happen in once a review-bomb starts.

This is just a problem for aggregation and numbers. There are still usually reviews by people who have valid criticisms and praise. The review bomb basically just renders the number meaningless and anything with too much negativity or praise becomes much harder to believe as real. So, maybe people just read reviewers whose opinions they already trust to not be contaminated by playing a culture war game with review scores. I'm sure some exist.

Yup, that's my dilemma. The whole point of these aggregation sites was to try to get a more objective measure of how good a movie actually is. But there's no paper trail for any of these sites' scores (it's not just RT), and it's become common practice to fudge the numbers with a special "algorithm". I guess I mostly just accepted this before, but TLM is such a ridiculous outlier that I'm starting to doubt whether there's any useful signal left.

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