Tl;dr: not reliable.

It never was...

Thank you for sharing

Something rotten about them...

No.

We still care about what critics have to say? When it comes to art, you like what you like. Who cares about what others think

In a nutshell: 1) Fandango buys rotten tomatoes in 2016, 2) they expand/widen the critic reviewer pool to include nobody bloggers, and then 3) movie studios court/bribe small fish reviewers to inflate their scores so they can get the fresh rating as a marketing point for their latest flick.

Nice to finally have this all spelled out. I've been burned several times over the last few years watching movies with like 79% ratings on RT that I thought sucked. Now I know why.

What's the alternative? IMDB is owned by Amazon and has a super dumb recency bias. I use Letterboxd and that might be the best at the moment. But the user base there is smaller and sometimes it feels like the only people reviewing movies are the select few who went out of their way to watch it so they are inherently skewed to like it.

I don't use it to find good movies, but I will filter out bad movies with it. I only consider the value when it is low.

No

"After five days of "Certified Fresh" movie propaganda, I began to grow suspicious. If every movie is un-rotten, then one of two things must be true:

Humanity Has Stopped Producing Bad Art

Rotten Tomatoes Has Changed"

3. Only "Fresh" movies advertise their rating.

I never found them to be reliable indicators of whether or not I will enjoy a movie. Not ever.

Is TMDB the best alternative out there?

Are there any fediverse alternatives?

Why repost this when it was already on !movies@piefed.social ? https://lemmy.world/post/34735983

Good read. I like the data. I've sussed out critics I tend to align with and read what they have to say after watching a movie, but never before. If I want to be disappointed I look to see what RT scores it for comparison. Granted, RT is a relatively spoiler free way to at-a-glance see if something might be worth spending money on but clearly it's less and less reliable over the years. Reminds me of Yelp and their bullshit. In a perfect world we'd all make much more money to see many more movies and not feel the need to min-max all the fuckin time. Maybe that's just me.