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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 8197523" data-attributes="member: 11760">Rotten Tomatoes couldn't continue to sell ads in a very tough environment for advertising (the pandemic era) if people didn't come to the site because they found it valuable. In fact, it needs a lot of people to come to the site to get the kind of advertisers it has. It's likely an extremely popular site.I think Rotten Tomatoes' bigger problem is that they don't want to admit that most critics aren't very good. They're aware of the issue, because they have a top critics section and an all-the-rest critics section, but they only show an aggregate critics score, not a score just based on what the top critics say.I've done professional criticism before. Gotten paid for it, got a fancy award for it. A good critic doesn't just say "hated it," like most of Rotten Tomatoes' critics (and most of the internet's critics) do nowadays, but provides the reader/viewer enough information to make a decision on their own. That might be fancy thoughts on how a work fits into the canon of post-modern literature or it might be a brief-but-not-spoilery explanation of a play and what was enjoyable about it and what wasn't. The majority of critics today aren't providing much more value than the guy sitting at the other end of the bar, spoiling Wandavision at the top of his lungs, is.My suspicion is that Rotten Tomatoes' internal traffic monitoring shows that most site visitors pick a movie and then click on what one or more top critics say (I look for Peter Travers' movie reviews, myself), which is how they've decided which are top critics and which are not. It they made the score of just what the audience thinks the most credible critics thinks their most prominent one, it'd likely be a lot more useful than what the current scoring system is.It wouldn't necessarily equal the audience score, since those are incredibly vulnerable to brigading, where people decide to destroy a movie because it offends their politics or worldview, or boost it up because they feel some sort of connection to the star, or whatever. It's the inherent danger of opt-in internet polling.But they can at least improve their critics score by not including the reviews from unknown outlets like -- looking at the <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/malcolm_and_marie/reviews?intcmp=rt-scorecard_tomatometer-reviews" target="_blank">Malcolm & Marie reviews</a> here -- That Shelf, Shadows on the Wall, The MacGuffin or HeyUGuys. They might be great reviewers, but I can't imagine, and I suspect Rotten Tomatoes' internal metrics show, that site visitors are coming there to see what they thought of a film, compared to outlets like the Salon, the Boston Globe, or FilmWeek (the reviews from an NPR station in Los Angeles), all of which are labeled as Top Critics, but not appearing on the first page of reviews.(In fact, since AARP Movies for Grownups is also listed as a Top Critic, I'm pretty sure it's based off of audience interest in the review, whether just through Rotten Tomatoes or through overall internet traffic stats.)</blockquote>

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