And another site is enveloped by shitifacation.
Edit: ENshittifacation. Apparently, shitifacation is where an airline loses all of your luggage, lol
Remember IMDB in the early 00s? It was all you needed from what it set out to be. I recently went back to grab some lists for automation and holy shit it’s a wasteland of bullshit. I can’t imagine getting lost in it for hours learning about movies and deciding what I wanted to watch next if it was what it has become
I really loved IMDb back in the day. While the user ratings weren’t perfect, there used to be a formula you could use to figure out the worthiness of a movie to watch. Now (10 years or so), IMDb user ratings are inundated with conservatives and older generations who tend to rate based on their fragile feelings rather than on how watchable a movie is.
conservatives and older generations who tend to rate based on their fragile feelings
“Woke” doesn’t mean what you think it means, JesusLittleKidLover88, and it certainly doesn’t apply to Crank 2.
Don’t forget the anime weirdos voting against incredibly popular shows so their anime can be the best one. Once Breaking Bad was knocked out of the top spots by Attack on Titan and Fullmetal Alchemist weebs I stopped caring about the ratings.
Tell me you haven’t seen either Attack on Titan or Fullmetal Alchemist without telling me you haven’t seen either fucking masterpiece.
Sure AoT is good and FMA might be good (but bored me tbh), but actively voting against other shows makes the fandoms look ass. Ozymandias was the best episode from any show and it shows you’ve never watched Breaking Bad.
Personal opinion re: “best episode from any show”. Very bold assumptions re: my familiarity with Breaking Bad
I miss the IMDb message boards so much. It was so neat to be able to ask a question about a movie or read a post someone made three years before explaining the ending.
Letterboxd has been slowly filling that void for me
shitifacation
The term is enshittification, penned by Cory Doctorow
Shitifacation was my last international holiday where the airline lost my luggage
Oof. THAT must have royally sucked
RT was shit from the start though.
not from the start, it wasn’t no. after they sold out, it became a corrupted willing tool of the studios. i made the move to metacritic 10 years ago.
Aren’t they based on the same reviews?
What’s to stop a PR firm from paying reviewers on Metacritic for good reviews?
oh they’re there too, it’s just the formatting, where “professional critics” are on the left side of the page, and users reviews are on the right as opposed to be hidden on an entire different page, it gives a more accurate view, in my personal opinion, or what users think. now, it gets brigades by the incels just like everywhere else, and there’s plenty of one review accounts which are seeded by the pr companies, but the site itself, I’ve never felt is actively accepting and designing their critic roster, review, splash pages, and recommendation processes like Rotten Tomatoes has since it sold out
IGN making this article is wild. I’m not accusing them of accepting literal money but come on lmao.
IGN: “Fifty dollars?! Have some fucking dignity. Our good reviews cost at least $200k”
It takes a thief to catch a thief
Yeah didn’t they give the latest Battlefield 9/10 on release? 😂
I was thinking the same lol
Aren’t they owned by the same company?
The MCU having as many good scores as it does is the biggest giveaway that RT is influenced by money or connections. Like there’s no way in hell the MCU has THAT many good movies when most of them are boring AF.
Not really. Up until recently, most of the MCU was good to great. I’m not exactly sure where the shift happened, but a lot of the more recent ones have been trash. I’m talking about the secret invasions and black widows, where they’ve completely lost the script.
After End Game was that shift. It felt like they told all there was to tell, and the stakes were gone. It peaked.
It already started slightly before Endgame - both Ant-Man and the Wasp, as well as Captain Marvel, weren’t great. After Endgame though it definitely fell off completely.
Kinda like season 7 and 8 of Game of Thrones. During season 7 we still had some hope left…
The peak is at whatever point you realized you had seen the same movie before.
Which is why RT scores were usually good. Because a RT percentage is just the percentage of critics that thought the film was good or better.
Too many people treat RT scores as a single “this is a film that has a quality rating of 90%” whereas it’s “90% of critics think it’s not shit”.
Really, this is RTs fault for picking a metric so often used in a different way.
Yeah everyone knows if something is popular it sucks.
However entertaining and fun the MCU has been at times, I’d say they’ve clearly gotten away with a lot when it comes to movie making. Like there are plenty of films in that franchise/cinematic-universe that just wouldn’t have cut it and would have died on the scrap heap as stand alone films. But the MCU glow kept them alive and folded them into the giant stream of MCU content.
Beyond that, I’d bet that the post-endgame stuff has been done objectively badly … like you could break it down into a number of poor movie/franchise making choices (like you can’t simply build a story out of “a multiverse”, it isn’t a character or plot idea, you need more). Love and Thunder was an awful film. Can anyone tell which characters are part of the story and which are being written out any more? Etc etc.
It’s all still popular though. Beyond that, your argument is a strawman … the MCU can be a give away (because, IMO, it has clearly made a number of missteps) without the question of popularity v quality being an issue.
The best part - Rotten Tomatoes can be manipulated by paying several people $50. Five Hamiltons.
I know reviewing movies doesn’t pay well, but I didn’t know it was that bad.
How many $50 reviewers did they have to buy though?
Looking at Ophelia… huh, it’s not on Rotten Tomatoes anymore…
Well, looking at ANOTHER crappy Daisy Ridley movie, Chaos Walking:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chaos_walking
21% rating on 154 reviews.
So 32 positive reviews and 122 negative reviews.
To hit 60% they would need to add 151 positive reviews. 183/305 total reviews.
At $50 a pop, those 151 positive reviews would run $7,550. Chump change.
If you really want to get depressed research how much representatives and senators have been bought off with in the recent past.
Rotten tomatoes had nothing to do with this. They don’t even employ critics. They aggregate them and the PR firm was directly contacting reviewers.
If you think RT hasn’t been in active incentive based collusion with studios and critic for years, you’re the type of purposefully ignorant that advertisers make their bread and butter off of. RT was been corrupt since they sold out, and that was a very very very long time ago now.
Didn’t they actively and very publicly suppresse reviews on a few movies because they called it brigading? I think one was girl Ghostbusters?
Also, the last jedi. Both are terrible movies. I had the same experience when watching both and thought I must be tripping balls and hallucinating at how bad both films were.
They have been playing fast and loose with who qualifies as a professional reviewer allowing for increased manipulation.
They’re saying their data is rotten.
The user reviews are where it’s at on rotten tomatoes. The critic reviews have been kinda suspect for a while.
the critic reviews have always been complete dogshit. too many movies get 100% or 0% on rotten tomatoes.
if i’m not mistaken IMDB ratings are only user based, and in my opinion, i almost never disagree with IMDB ratings and i think it’s because it has a vastly larger voting group to get a more accurate viewer consensus even if a small number of critics give a 0/10 or 10/10
Who would’ve thought that this was happening on a site with often massive disparities between Critic and Public reviews, almost always related to content with big marketing budgets.
Good god has the world not figured this out already? Or was it a conspiracy theory until now?
Yeah no shit, RT end IMDb have been review shills for years, completely worthless
Yeah, I’ve seen it too. Anybody got good suggestions for alternatives?
Check out Letterboxd. But the star rating system is used a bit differently than you might be used to, like an average move will get a 3/5 stars, and that’s not a “bad” score. Just took me a bit getting used to
Forget aggregators. Find a couple critics you usually agree with. People have different tastes.
The issue is that every site uses the same critics to aggregate scores from. That being said I like using metacritic since you can view it by audience rating, and excluding the anti-woke, incel brigades on some media it usually aligns pretty well with what score I’d personally give a movie.
deleted by creator
Uncovered? I thought it was public knowledge for years.
I always just assumed that the badly rated ones might be legit but that the higher ones may have had a few bought off critics (because capitalism) here and there, but now I know I’m right.
Anybody who hasn’t noticed the change in recent years hasn’t been paying attention.
Movie / TV reviews are such a shit show. I rarely find myself agreeing with the averaged out rating.
These days I’ll just make sure the rating is above say 30 and beyond that I’ll rely on trailers and reading actual reviews. But finding new movies and tv shows to watch is quite a chore as a result.
I hope someday soon AI can be employed to give you real personalized recommendations that don’t suck. But realistically it’ll just be more shitty algorithms meant to serve the interests of the highest bidder.
This is why I liked rotten tomatoes, it separates the critics scores from the audience scores.
Yeah I definitely assign more value to the audience reviews. Critics are mostly useless, unless you identify ones that align with your personal taste.
Honestly if they are close enough to what you like it can be manageable. A critic that knows enough about themselves to understand why people like things they don’t they can be very worthwhile.
Some critics notably just don’t like action movies. An action movie B for them is probably a solid A for most.
Also for as much hate as it gets, places like Pitchfork where critics actually speak their mind are important.
I’m thinking the world just needs more one-off prolific critics that really give you how they feel about things. It’s funny that IGN is talking here, as they are very well known for being paid off and using the 70-100 rating scale so they don’t piss anyone off.
It can tell you if it’s an artsy movie. The disparity between them is interesting.
I’ve also noticed the opposite effect. Where if a movie is leaning into being plain and easy to watch you’ll have critics rating it down cause they wanted it to do some artsy stuff. Definitely feels like critics are more on the artsy side of the scale, which is fine but doesn’t always align with what I’m looking for.
You either die a hero slowly becomes a villain
Anyone know of any good - maybe open source/federated - alternatives?
The problem is that any review aggregator is wide open to manipulation, you just rely on the integrity of the reviewers, which has shown to be lacking.
I’d like a Fediverse version of IMDb but that’s another thing entirely.
Rotten tomatoes wasn’t paid. Their independent reviewers were. A federated version would be even more vulnerable to this kind of thing.
Maybe we should start posting our own movie review here on Lemmy and let lemmings comment and vote.
I use https://www.themoviedb.org/ quite often, it’s pretty good.
For anyone that might care, I found this pretty neat IMDB front-end: https://libremdb.iket.me
Fosstard take
