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1yr ago
You should get a couple days ban for being so antagonistic. That edit to the original post is a shameful act for someone that's supposed to be a mod.
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2mo ago
For firefox and not mentioned by others: old reddit redirect.
plural
1yr ago
Smirkgate kid got all his cases dismissed for being "objectively unverifiable" so the media's response was just non-actionable opinions. Which means they're broad or vague enough that you can't objectively say they're false. Though he did settle with CNN and The Washington Post before the trial was dismissed so he got something.
Other kids at the school trying to file a suit pseudonymously had their case thrown out for being pseudonymous but it was also stated that it would have been dismissed anyway because of the same reason as above.
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1yr ago
There's no reason to talk about Jan 6 on themotte. The topic exists for one person and they hold it hostage as a one man army. It's pretty remarkable but I don't have the wherewithal in me to withstand the scrutiny.
It feels like what would happen if ChrisPrattAlphaRaptor showed up any time you mentioned COVID to disprove you or interrogate you as if you were a collegial equal. And it's not even solely about that kind of engagement, the obvious amount that this matters to ymehskhout is so large that I'd feel uncomfortable with any engagement at all because without full agreement I'd be immediately be dealing with a hostile adversary who knows far more about this than I do and is schooled in the subject much more than I am as well.
It feels like that guy who posts about Ivermectin and Scott. He probably knows what he's talking about more than me, but it's obvious from the persistence on a specific topic alone that something altogether alien to me is happening for them that's not happening for me and I'd rather just skip and move on to the next topic than engage.
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8mo ago
What compromise could the right offer the left that they would want? And what compromise could the left offer the right that they'd be willing to give up? The right would probably want stricter voter harvesting laws and some kind of approval system for vote-by-mail, and better oversight for vote counting in exchange for what checking IDs at the voting site? Most reasonable right-aligned people I've seen do not believe that voter fraud in that sense of someone voting twice or without the legal right to vote voting is rampant or affecting the election count to a changeable degree. The left has all the power, is already in the lead for the most part, and gets a political issue that at worst makes them seem naive in that they're defending the poor and downtrodden.
Also, even discussing the compromise will shift the debate landscape and it will suddenly not be about what the unreasonable people are saying. It's easier to come at this saying, well if the problem is just people who shouldn't be voting having a higher barrier of entry to committing voter fraud then why couldn't they come to some compromise? Because the people that seriously want to do something about this topic have serious changes in mind and most of them have nothing to do with how their opponents characterize their position. So, the people that think thousands of people illegally voted to a degree to change the outcome of an election are not going to want this because they're likely unreasonable because they are the caricature their opponent uses as an example of the other side and the people who would make the compromise probably wouldn't see the value in compromising toward something that amounts to giving themselves a worse position because making it easier for people to vote doesn't work in their favor: most people are left, why would they compromise to get more people IDs to vote when they're likely to not vote for their side by two metrics because they're more likely to be left-leaning in general and also specifically more likely to be left-leaning because of the situation they're in. It makes no sense to give your opponent a win like that to get some law about people checking state-IDs which probably from the evidence, I suspect, would not change anything, and even if it would it wouldn't be enforced anyway.
And that state census solution of finding people for 10k and forcing them to register sounds like it would be insanely disapproved by both sides as being authoritarian government overreach that would likely never be fully finished. It sounds like a make-work investigatory bureau would be created for the purpose and they'd likely antagonize many people, accomplish very little, and end up being used for things entirely unrelated to its stated purpose because its purpose would be impossible to accomplish anyway.
I don't know what the solution is but from my perspective it seems like mostly people entrenched in this aren't looking for solutions because the issue is more valuable existing than a resolution of the issue because most people don't care. I'm against voter fraud (so is most everyone), I want to help the poor (so does most everyone). It's probably a political issue of magnitude precisely because it's really hard to politically step in it because the issue is so seemingly contained to itself. Other soundbyte positions like being "for jobs" (but what about free trade?) or wanting to lower taxes (but how will you pay for anything?) require much more complex solutions. The issues without compromise are the easiest to represent yourself with the more compromise that leaks into whatever the issue is then the harder it would be to take a stance or even talk about at all. I think politically wedge issues are too easy to give up because most of them have two positions with no real nuance that you can talk about while appealing to your base, if they start talking about compromise then they're talking to people who won't vote for them so what's the advantage in an election? And what's the advantage of making the compromise when it comes to governing for that matter?
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3mo ago
I know nothing about gridiron football or Taylor Swift but it seems obvious that it was an ad. I can point to the fact that during the entire NFL season the entertainment news site Deadline (which doesn't do celebrity gossip) ran a weekly story basically about Taylor Swift sitting in the stands during the games. It had the same vibe as these SNL ad stories they do every weekend where they basically describe the opening monologue from SNL and two sketches as if they need to be covered and are part of the zeitgeist but it's just another crappy sketch from a show that hasn't been relevant in years. I mean it's likely a circle of different media companies (Taylor, NFL, entertainment media) feeding and trying to broaden all their fanbases. Like a car commercial inserted into a TV show that's handled clumsily. Even people that don't realize it's a commercial can recognize that something is inauthentic about it. Maybe there's nothing intentional on either Taylor (probably impossible to tell) or the NFL (I haven't seen any of the broadcasts with her) about this but the entertainment media is absolutely using this, stoking it, and reveling in it when it might not even exist as a thing if they didn't.
My thought was, at first, that it must be a huge spectacle style distraction for them to run a news story about it. But the consistency of the articles and lack of any substance made it obvious it was an ad. The complaints make sense to me "Why do you care they're cutting to Taylor three times a game?" Because it's an ad and ads are annoying. Ads recently have an ideological bent which makes conservatives especially wary of them. Conservatives, to some extent rightly, see weird astroturfed media shit all the time dedicated to hating/destroying them because the media is mostly their enemy. The fact that they decide to create a conspiracy because the astroturfed weirdness of this is obvious and they're just making the mistake of thinking that this is political because most of the weird astroturfed stuff from the NFL in the past years has been political is understandable. And the fact that conspiratorial complaints get platformed to discredit real complaints is just business as usual for the media.
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9mo ago
The extra click is crucial for participation and being exposed to ideas you would normally avoid. In threads the title so important and half the time that title seems either like clickbait or something I'm not interested in or indecipherable without clicking to clarify. Going in and out of threads I may be interested in seems just like a worse version of what's done now. As someone else said when this was brought up before you end up reading things you never would before because they're all in one thread as top level comments. And I also think it promotes participation because it ends up taking the heat off of a top-level comment rather than a top level thread there might not be any real distinction but being buried in a 1000 other comments when people tear your ideas apart is a lot more comfortable than that failure existing on its own. I think burying old ideas weekly helps everyone, the deeper comments go the more angry and snipey they get and forcing a new topic is a great cooling method for that, I think the weekend and switching off to the friday fun thread then small scale questions thread helps with that as well.
The idea also segregates all topics. Some people might see that as a good thing but it's just an exercise in people radicalizing themselves. I can see dissenters becoming fewer and fewer as each separate single-interest topic is dominated by those that have a lot of interest in something. People will start avoiding threads started by users they don't like and it'll become even more about people who just agree with each other. And you lose that "there's someone wrong on the internet! this won't stand." drive where you see something that you think or know is wrong and feel compelled to correct them. A top level thread usually presents no facts or real ideas in its title and you lose that possible drive. Every new topic about people's specific bugbears will just be dominated by those people and become a "HBD general" or "AI threat general" or "Immigration general" if people think that the majority opinion dominates and destroys minority opinions now then it would only get worse.
It also creates an idea of staying-on-topic that limits conversation. You can go into a top level comment about the economy and then have people start talking about AI safety two comments deep and it feels normal and fine to switch to that and even if it would be alright otherwise you limit how many people are going to participate in that topic-switch or even know its there.
I do agree that it sucks if you want to post and respond to serious topics on the weekend but that could be fixed by staggering the thread's replacement every few weeks or so but otherwise I think thread level topics will just end up in worse quality probably worse engagement and more personally it would "fuck my shit up" with regard to how I consume what's on this site with all the extra navigation and clicking that it would require.
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2mo ago
I've heard only negative things about it from anywhere online that wasn't part of, or tangentially part of, the mainstream media. I'm actually surprised it's rated at 61% (though almost anything below 90% for a TV show on RT is abysmal). But it should be noted that reviews are just not worth anything anymore. Almost everything receives either universal acclaim on Rottentomatoes which translates to about 70-80 on metacritic, almost anything outside of this usually comes from a much lower amount of reviewers even bothering to review the media to begin with.
Night Country was interesting to me because I was kinda annoyed that they brought in new people but Pizzolato last two seasons were underwhelming (Though, to me, I'd put that on mostly not having Cary Fukunaga to direct every episode). I was waiting for it to finish but it was heavily advertised and I noticed it a lot. Basically it was on my tablet when opening an empty tab in Brave it puts paid news there if you scroll down and Night Country was there every week like clockwork. First, it was the rave reviews, then the huge viewership numbers, and then it was basically articles taunting people who disliked it by saying that despite a small number of online detractors it was the most successful True Detective season ever both critically and in viewership numbers. When the finale rolled around it literally used the Rolling Stone review that said it was the best ending the series has ever had.
Naturally, I went to reddit's television to see what they thought and they were aghast. Game of Thrones season 8 levels, and this was in normal non-fandom subreddit. The show's main subreddit was just memeing all over it. The best people could come up with was meek, "I didn't think it was that bad." being heavily downvoted at the bottom.
I half expected this because we're in a revival era, but nobody who actually made the original shows is participating in the revivals. They brought back Justified to make a show that was nonsensical and bad but worse was not really in any way the show that had come before. They didn't bring back any of the writers and didn't really bring back anyone but the main character, and Olyphant brought his daughter in real life to play his daughter in the show and it was just painful to watch. They brought back In Treatment but replaced Gabriel Byrne with Uzo Aduba and I just didn't even want to deal with it because aside from not bringing back the star they also didn't bring back the creative team. Frasier they brought back Kelsey only and it really shows. It's just a modern shitty/middling sitcom that happens to have the same character. Why are they not even bothering to try to make these good at all? The exception I'll give is Party Down which, funnily enough brought back everyone they could, including the creative team. Even when it was blatently political and culture warring it was still better than these lazy ersatz elevator-music cover songs of something people used to like.
Night Country is just an example of things that have come before and haven't been noticed because most of the time things can squeeze by with just the right amount of mediocrity. They put their leads and creative lead front and center and girl-bossed their way into being called a good show, after they stole another show's name for seemingly little reason other than marketing. But all these things compound the other way. The better your show is supposed to be the worse it seems when it's not and this goes similarly to taking another's show's name for no reason. The culture war only exists when these projects fail, you don't like it you're sexist/racist/etc, otherwise it's yaasss queen slay even if it's just barely clearing the bar of success.
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10mo ago
Speaking of apples to oranges comparisons.
Rottentomatoes critic scores before a certain era and for certain products are absolutely not useful because they have so few reviews compared to anything recent and until streaming there were very few serious about making reviews for direct-to-dvd movies. Black Stallion Returns has 5 critic reviews. The Little Mermaid II has 6 critic reviews (and one of them is a duplicate). I don't see how you can take the comparison between thousands of user reviews seriously with that discrepancy.
Not to mention the fact that reviews for older movies are almost never going to draw review-bombing, and almost always going to have people leaving a less critical review of something older because it was older, because their nostalgia, because if they thought it was middling they wouldn't care to make a review for it. Hype, marketing, cultural issues (warring or not) probably skew reviews for modern things in ways that I have a hard time believing are going to reflect accurately back when examining 40 year old movies or direct-to-dvd sequels that came out in 2000.
A better comparison would be to take a movie without controversy, to my knowledge that fits in a similar mold. Look at The Lion King(2019) 52% critic and 85% audience and Aladdin (2019) with a 48% critic and 95% audience which would seem to suggest along with Beauty and the Beast that verified audience percentages make disney movies review proof for audiences. Then again there's Dumbo (2019) 46% critic and 48% audience, Mulan (2020) 78% critic and 46% audience, Lady and the Tramp (2019) 66% critic, 50% audience and finally, Pinnochio (2022) 29% critic and 27% audience. If IMDB has admitted they had to weight the score of The Little Mermaid to combat review bombing and rottentomatoes is releasing a 95% with no comment, I find it hard to believe. Not impossible taking into account something like Aladdin, but still hard to believe.
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9hr ago
I mean, I don't agree with the conclusions here but his fame outside of football is absolutely manufactured. Though, that doesn't mean it wasn't built on something that exists.
But I didn't know he existed until last summer when suddenly he had a documentary, started dating Taylor Swift, hosted Saturday Night Live within like six months. Not to say that most people that are famous aren't manufactured in some way as well, that's the game. It's just personal PR but it's certainly not coming organically. I had no idea who the last like (insert number) of whatever boyfriend's Taylor Swift had before this so it can't just be that. Nor were there personal stories inserted into non-gossip publications dedicated to them simply being Taylor Swift's boyfriend. Maybe it's a convergence of things and simply luck, that they decided to run more stories about this relationship than the previous ones, but it's still manufacturing fame.
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26d ago
While you may be right, I'd quibble with considerably. Moving from Reddit is going to do that regardless because Reddit's rules make a place more left wing because they restrict what you can talk about to begin with. And you lose people that would prefer Reddit over other places and they'd probably be more left wing just going by the idea that: 1) someone using reddit at all is more likely to be left wing. 2) people leaving reddit for another site are more likely to be right wing. The entire idea that the motte leave reddit at all is explicitly right wing coded. Discussing HBD is right wing coded. Discussing trans issues is right wing coded (I say that because discussing means there's more than one view represented). In my experience discussing issues at all is right wing coded. Most of the people I know and most of the people I encounter are left wing and have no interest at all in talking about anything to do with actual issues, they have their stance they've taken and if you talk about it deeper you're a racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, shitty person. Unless you're dedicated to proving right wing people wrong in every situation you're simply a bad person. I've heard this many times. And I suppose it's mostly a confluence of most people being left wing and most people really being unable to tolerate content they disagree with and being almost wholly uncurious. But all that being said, it's like IG-111, we're here because we're witches and they allow witches here. The 1000 witches problem is never really going to go away.
I do think that you're posting this in bad faith, however. Considering your examples of most upvoted comments are sitting at 7, 10, and 18 votes and your summary of each being both inaccurate and uncharitable. Why did no one respond to your HBD post about white suffering, because almost no one cares about HBD anymore. The idea that HBD has been talked about to death has been talked about to death, here. But you made it very clear in your post that you didn't believe what you wrote, it wasn't a trick like that post about one movie destroying a child's brain. Do you believe that no one read your disclaimer or that no one here respects steelmanning an argument they don't believe? Is that why you didn't bother to link to it? You brought up none of those rebuttals yourself but instead make a top level post calling people out who actually had the courage to make a post about something they believe and you're mad because they got a marginal amount of internet points and that nobody brought up your own points. It's hard enough to have the energy to argue your own thoughts, now you want us to argue yours as well.
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2mo ago
The critics had the whole season available to review. You can click on all the good reviews by critics here and see that. https://www.metacritic.com/tv/true-detective/season-4/
But you're right, it was poorly reviewed by a lot of outlets, it's just to come out looking good on aggregators you only have to have a few 100s/90s to balance that out and still look well reviewed.
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4mo ago
It's also not a fair hypothetical unless you think there's no difference between incest and sex. There's not a different name for playing tennis when you do it with your family.
The indirect hypothetical has more to it but I also wouldn't hire any of my family as a doctor, a contractor, to clean my house, be my personal trainer, but I also think this also works from the other way around. A lot of people who are of certain professions wouldn't want to have to do it for a family member either and wouldn't want their family to participate in helping them financially, and it's probably very much related to shame but mixing personal life and work is just innately uncomfortable for some people.
It's a wide net though to catch shame and discomfort or government compulsion. If the idea is that it's fake in the sense that being a model, actor, streamer, artist, athlete, is fake either because it's something that people would do for fun or it's not particularly hard, then I get that angle a lot more but then I'm not sure what the validity is for. I'm sure a lot of people are ashamed of their relatives for playing videogames on twitch and wouldn't tell anyone about it or watch them do it, but a lot of people wouldn't read their novel written by a family member if they thought it was too prurient or violent or was just something they were culturally opposed to. I'm sure there are many people ashamed of family members being janitors. garbage men, house cleaners and wouldn't hire them or recommend them to friends.
Anyway, I think if the original hypothetical is as ridiculous as saying tennis and sex are the same it's not really helpful to just up the hypothetical up a notch and say that incest and sex are the same.
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10mo ago
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.
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1yr ago
I'm not saying I agree with Nybbler. Someone behaving poorly does not excuse behaving poorly yourself. That edit's purpose is to be a petty insult, if it wasn't there'd be no reason to mention the person you're insulting. You could have easily just left the name out, but you wanted it to be insulting. I was asked to review the original post before I went into the thread and I thought it needed a warning because of the way it just called out another user seemingly for no reason. But after reading your post in response, the edit of that, and then the edit of the original post. It's just pure insult and pretending to be otherwise. I can understand banter and swipes and barbs to people with whom we disagree. But you go out of your way to humiliate and troll other users and get away with it because they made a mistake and were wrong and you are right. It's an aggressive and uncharitable trend you make a habit of and it disappoints me immensely that you can just get away with it because you do it with a smile and a bunch of links.
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1yr ago
In one of the recent episodes of South Park they reveal that Token's name was actually Tolkien the whole time (because his parents loved Lord of the Rings) and Stan was the only person who actually thought it was Token.
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1yr ago
I'd bet it has something to do with the fact that small businesses and individuals aren't really a big enough fiscal presence on the internet to matter. Everything is big websites of big companies anyway. I remember reading/talking about how without Net Neutrality we'd just be a few giant websites and that's how it happened out anyway even with Net Neutrality in place.
Related to this, I was reading about Netflix peering deals because I was wondering how Net Neutrality dealt with that and apparently ISPs can effectively throttle large companies if they feel like it because refusing connections from another network and/or not delivering it in a timely fashion is not a violation of Net Neutrality. It only becomes about Net Neutrality when it's on their network. So, they can essentially extort money from Netflix to keep its connections to their network from being refused or connected slowly.
I think people just assumed Net Neutrality meant more than it actually does because to my tiny mind the above seems like just the kind of thing that Net Neutrality should protect against.
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1yr ago
I mean you're right, it's just signalling. I'd bet those people who said they'd never eat at Chik-fil-A are lying or simply don't like it and happen to be telling the truth for that reason. I've seen numerous woke people just give up caring when it comes to boycotting anything they like. Sure, Chick-fil-A and In & Out* are "piece of shit" companies but they still order it anyway they just make sure to let you know that it's wrong to do it. It's also possible there are people taking a principled stand that just don't talk about it but every single person I've met, or seen online, who's talked about this issue (and recently, too) has admitted that Chick-fil-A is a bad or piece of shit company and then still bought Chick-fil-A.
People I've seen, for the most part, have no idea about the object-level reasons why someone or something is bad. It's the same for anything political, really. They get given a vague idea by someone else who summed it up and their mind is made up. JK Rowling might be a perfect example of most of these people being the most informed about the reason why they're supposed to hate, but I bet none of them know what she's actually said. They just know that she's anti-trans. But they'll still see the next Fantastic Beasts movie and buy the next Harry Potter game.
I will admit this is stronger on the left side of things. The not knowing part, but I wonder if that's partly because of their cultural dominance and maybe the fact that right side people maybe feel like they need to look everything up several times to verify it because they don't trust a left source which would be most of them. And part of the cultural dominance is keeping the signals straight and in line with each other. On Reddit right now there were about four or five coordinated stories about Jordan Peterson crying about being called an incel by Olivia Wilde. But actually he cried for incels in general but nobody read the actual article or the video it was about. Most people repeated things about him that were patently false to signal to everyone that they know he's bad news. I bet they believe it. Once it's about politics/culture war information becomes useless. It's shocking to me how cavalier people are with their hatred.
*I'm not sure that In & Out has even done the getting sullied with a game of telephone thing, but simply being openly Christian is mostly enough and the rest is filled in with whatever their head made up, incidentally this is why Chris Pratt is a "piece of shit". I've heard this about him several times. But I bet you they still see the next Chris Pratt movie and then make a big point to complain about him when they don't even know what he's bad for except that he's Christian and/or Republican.
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1mo ago
In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.
I didn't know Sweet Baby Inc existed before a post about the new Suicide Squad game was on the front page of /r/all on reddit which was a dossier in the game written by Lex Luther praising the Amazonian culture of Wonder Woman for not having "toxic masculinity" and the comments were talking about Sweet Baby Inc as the reason this kind of writing exists.
That aside people complain about "woke" writing in videogames all the time. It's just that the people that do it usually either do it very badly or the ones that do it badly are very heavily exposed and then completely dismissed. The Last of Us Part 2 was heavily criticized for bad writing and injecting woke themes to the detriment of its plot aside from people not liking the plot itself or the way it was told. That was huge in the gaming sphere and was a much bigger bone of contention than Sweet Baby Inc is now, mostly because the culture war was used as a cudgel to deny any merit to criticism of the game.
From what I've seen, on reddit at least, there's nothing like a culture war touchstone like gamergate, everyone just shits on the writing of Sweet Baby Inc and there's not even any pushback at all which is really rare. Probably because it's like that diversity tool that blizzard made, people who don't care or like woke content will defend it at all costs if they think it's real artistic intent but the fact that it's counterfeit corporate checkboxing to make sure the game is woke probably pushes any defense the people who would defend the games woke content would have away. Naked corporate manipulation for profit (though, I can't imagine how this is profitable, but I also can't imagine how to spin these things any other way that's not them nakedly saying they're paying people to create propaganda tools/writing) is on the same level as being generally right wing. Which is a long way of saying I don't think people are heavily invested in this because most people are at the very least vaguely aware this was happening already, they just maybe thought it was from agenda pushers involved in the game dev process, the reveal that it's ingrained at a corporate level doesn't change much for people who didn't like the fact that it was there and definitely isn't a damsel that people need to rescue like Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkesian.
I was just perusing /r/kotakuinaction to look at what they were saying about it and one of the comments was "might as well call it Jan 6 "Insurrection" part 2 since they have as much in common."
It feels like outlets that got a lot of traffic from gamergate are trying to push the name again to generate more ruckus for clicks or attention on both sides.
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3mo ago
I rarely agree with Hlynka but there's a wide gulf of antagonism between referring to groups and going after individual posters. Also, those responses to your post were about as low effort as your response was and not directed at the higher effort top-level post, so I'm not sure why you're complaining about this being analogous.
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5mo ago
I remember reading an askreddit thread of a European or possibly Australian asking why there was so much toilet clogging in their media when it literally never happened to them. Some people who had experience in America and different countries explained that American sewage pipes were an inch or more smaller than European sewage pipes.
I couldn't find that specific reddit thread but there was a thing that had this link: https://pottygirl.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/why-do-american-toilets-clog/
Which suggests the clog factor is mostly about different design.
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5mo ago
Elba as bond I think is an interesting point. Mainly because most of the race swapping doesn't seem to be for any reason other than race swapping.
Remember when Halle Berry was Catwoman? Aside from the movie being garbage I don't remember anyone caring that Catwoman had been race swapped and that was because they chose an A-list (maybe at the time) actor with talent to play the character. Or when Michael Clarke Duncan was Kingpin? How about Sam Jackson as Nick Fury? Will Smith as Jim West? Similar feelings I assume will resonate with an Elba Bond. How about Morgan Freeman as Red in Shawshank Redemption?
It just feels like regardless of acting ability fifteen years ago they'd race swap Bond to Elba, or Doctor Who to someone with the star power of like Chiwetal Ejiofor. But nowadays they'll race swap the doctor to a third lead on a Netflix comedy. I'm sure he's a good actor but it's just an easy trend to spot where the race swapping also ends up making things cheaper production-wise. The Little Mermaid's black, "who's playing her?" someone who's black. The doctor is black, "who's playing the doctor?" someone who's black, and gay, and wasn't born in the UK. I think it's obvious that it feels different now because they really do it different now and it has a lot to do with agenda pushing or the pretense of agenda pushing to get a cheaper actor.
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10mo ago
Of course, if you assume that Rottentomatoes is not manipulating any data than the data comes back to show exactly what they're telling you. But I was suggesting that they were secretly weighting the score which may seem conspiracy nutty but that's the entire point of looking at it and thinking "this seems strange, I don't buy it." I'm not going to say nobody believes that the score matches what the website shows but I believe most people who think things might be being manipulated think that a portion of negative reviews are being excluded outside of their own verification system because it's socially/politically in their interest to do so for any number of reasons. There's been so many instances of things being protected from false reviews in the past few years that I find it hard to believe without any hint of doubt that the 95% reflects reality.
Protecting TV shows/videogames/movies from review-bombing for political reasons is considered just what a good/respectable company does these days. In the same way that allowing people to talk about certain risque things or have certain opinions isn't allowed, saying "I didn't like this product because I don't like its political message" is only allowed in one direction and if it's the wrong direction (right slanted) then that is deemed bad and cracked down on in some way by changing how the reviews work (netflix), limiting reviews affecting scores when a lot of reviews happen at once (steam), verifying reviews in some way (rottentomatoes), all these things only exist because of review-bombing for political/culture war reasons. It's clear that review-bombing does happen by people who haven't consumed the media but even in cases where money is confirmed to have changed hands (steam) they still have protections for review-bombing because there are reasons for reviews that are deemed invalid. It seems easy for a website like Rottentomatoes to just turn off commentless zero star reviews for something even if it's been "verified" (I put a quotes because I don't know how their verification works). It's relatively conspiratorial and I don't necessarily believe it 100% but it doesn't strike me as crazy outlandish to do.
I also would find it easy to believe that a pr company would manufacture bad user reviews for something like metacritic to take a 5.0 down to a 2.0 and flood it with reviews specifically targeting the woke angle of something to completely erase the perceived value of user reviews that are bad or middling. I said in another post that I just don't trust rottentomatoes in the same way I don't trust wikipedia for anything political. Manipulation is just too easy even discounting RT doing it themselves. There are plenty of people that would give a 5/10 a 6/10 purely for culture war reasons and vice versa. But given the critic reviews, genre-fatigue (I guess live action remakes are maybe a genre), the baked-in culture war angle from both sides(I've seen three articles on deadline about how it sets a bad example for women, erases black slavery, and appropriates drag culture) I still find it hard to believe that it sits at 95%. I didn't say impossible, just hard to believe.
plural
1yr ago
My problem with Ex Machina is the ending. It makes the AI seem stupid. It has no idea where the helicopter will go, how long it will take to get there, and could have easily kept manipulating the protagonist until it was safely away and set up in a place where it could charge or a place to betray the protagonist later and escape in a world that has far less variables. I think it just threw away logic for a "Yaas Queen Slay" ending. But to me that's what happens at the end of almost any Alex Garland movie/tv show. Not necessarily about the queen slaying but about throwing away logic for an emotional payoff that trips all over the logical parts that came before. And I really like Alex Garland but I feel like he's just an ending stumbler.
The letter says that there was a lot of misinformation/disinformation about the referendum and the mainstream media was complicit in this by showing both sides. Is Australia's media really like this?
I mean I have no doubt that there's probably a lot of partisan media but I'm wondering how true this is because my exposure has usually left me thinking that media there is about as left-leaning as America's.
Anyway, it's probably a good thing they went for that invective though if you don't want the pending disinformation bill to pass. I'd bet if that letter was a lot softer they could convince a lot more people that "a 'false sense of balance' over facts." needs some agency to force the media to make rules to be policed.
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