Rotten Tomatoes Under Fire After PR Firm's Scheme to Pay Critics for Positive Reviews Uncovered

Comments

• Kerfuffle@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The title makes it sound like Rotten Tomatoes deliberately did something shady. What actually seems to have happened is:

  1. Rotten Tomatoes aggregates critic reviews. As far as I know, those critics aren’t really affiliated with Rotten Tomatoes.
  2. Some of the critics that make up that aggregated rating got bribed to increase their evaluation of the movie.
  3. Consequently the score on sites that aggregate reviews like Rotten Tomatoes increased.

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  • paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The corruption of useful information or indexes of useful information continues.

    Google Search, aggregated reviews, the Youtube algorithm, etc. They all succumb to corruption, greed and exploitation. Once something is good and useful, it becomes a target.

    How does a source of aggregated information overcome becoming a target of corruption?

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  • Saneless@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Thank you. Another post worded it to be RT did this.

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  • gnygnygny@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    1. Grab $
    2. Manipulate critics
    3. Caviar taste better than tomatoes

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• baruchin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Title is misleading. Why Rotten Tomatoes? The bribes went to critics not to the site which is just a critics aggregator.

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• Fantomas@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I mean this was so obvious. Pay for positive critic reviews and call any user reviews that weren’t favourable names.

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  • Zrybew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Bad Boy For Life on 90 score convinced me the site was a fraud. That Shit is unwatchable.

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• brihuang95@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’ve been using IMDB for the past year or so. Anyone know if they pay for reviews too?

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  • V4ty6BybVXjr@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    There is a profit motive to polish turds and therefore someone will be bending/breaking rules in this area. It’s surely just a question of how much and how often.

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    • agent_flounder@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I think if the site is popular enough it will be a target for shills.

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    • cheese_greater@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      How does something like, say, Wikipedia avoid this issue? Is it because Wikipedia focuses on factuality whereas critic reviews are inherently qualitative/subjective?

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• alienanimals@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Rotten Tomatoes will also stop all new reviews if a movie is bombing. They definitely manipulate their ratings.

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