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Notes -
Cultural war and cultural revolution continues, as it should.
Revolution has a beginning, but it has no end.
And the newest battle is the most ancient, Homer's - and Christopher Nolan’s - Odyssey.
Many are happy, many are unhappy, and among the latter is world's richest man, as expected.
Elon was unhappy so much that he promised to rifle through his pockets for some spare change and give Mel Gibson $100 million to remake Odyssey in fully authentic and historically accurate way, with Greek actors and spoken in proper Homeric Greek.
Then, the next day, he changed his mind. Directors - and actors - are as obsolete as draft horses, Grok can do it all alone and cheaper.
If it happens, would it make a difference? Elite Mottizen human capital had been talking and daydreaming for a long time about potential of money to change the world. If only we were rich men!
The real life billionaire and centi millionaire activism is not encouraging but we can always dream how we will do it right!
edit: links
Related to this topic: Rotten Tomatoes manipulating review scores.
There's now a website account for the change the website made in around 2019, where it started weighing the scores towards ticket buyers through a phone app.
Odyssey was heavily featured as having a 97% Audience score on RT, but a 60% score when adjusted for the 2019 changes. More specific info can be found in the 'More Info' tab.
It's kind of crazy to me that this is spawned from /r/KotakuInAction . Old dogs continue to bark.
Would be a big deal if true, let's see what the alleged manipulation is.
"Before 2019, RT made you work to rate a film. You logged in, found the page, and submitted. So only motivated fans bothered.
After 2019, RT switched to a "PUSH" system. Ticket apps like Fandango ping you after the show. ONE TAP on 1–5 ⭐, and you're done"
That doesn't sound like manipulation, that actually sounds like a better system. You want to get an idea of what the general public believes, you poll the general public. Push notifications with easy reviews is how you get the casuals to tell you their opinion. Plus it being from the ticket apps means they're all inherently confirmed viewers too which helps to mitigate culture war shenanigans and review bombing.
Most movies having a negative "popcorn gap" should be expected, we know with all sorts of feedback systems that they skew away from normal users and towards complainers and the more friction there is the more the skew tends to be.
Why? Few would notice, and those that noticed would be ignored. To they extent they're not ignored, you'd have a good chunk of people coming up with arguments for why it's not true. Even if it somehow came out that it definitely is true, people would just shrug, like they did with the "far right conspiracy theory" of shadowbanninf on other social media.
Doesn't sound like a big deal to me.
It would be a big deal if actual manipulation could be shown and proven, particularly if it happened constantly and wasn't just a one off like "oh this reviewer got caught in a bribery scandal".
The big issue is that most of the time when people claim to find something like that they're wrong and everyone knows it's wrong and stupid so they get ignored. Like this right here, where the site is alleging manipulation as the bailey and then retreating to "it's just that they're polling the normies now instead of self selected users on the website" as the motte is not going to win anyone over.
You're just repeating the original assertion, not explaining why you believe it's true.
I disagree. People claimed that social media was shadowbanning and limiting their them based on their politics, it was called a conspiracy theory, and ended up being 100% true for multiple social media platforms. People thought Google is deranking independent websites, people like you called it conspiracy theory, and it turns out to be 100%, and so on, and so on...
Manipulating algorithms you have power over is completely normal. Your insistence that it would cause any sort of scandal strikes me as extremely naive and baseless.
If the right can rally around scandals as first world problem as "a beer brand did a promo with a trans tiktoker as part of their plan to recruit more customers" and "the mnm is less sexy" then certainly they could rally around greater scandals. The issue is, those scandals, as silly as they were are at least true. Bud Light did do a promo with a trans tiktoker. The MMM could be considered less sexy.
So if it was real, we can either ask ourselves "do right wingers really care about more jerking off to candy than rotten tomatoes manipulating review scores?" or consider that there's so little meat in the claim that no one can get it taken seriously. I proposed the second, they aren't manipulated just because of a 2019 change to increase poll responsiveness among casual viewers.
Or consider that just like the false claims of manipulated review scores, these also lack anything actually substantial to rally around so everyone cared more about sexy candy.
"It turned out it was true all along" is one of my favorite type of arguments however. I hear the same thing from anti vaxxers, how it's finally been proven that they're dangerous and cause autism or whatever else. It happen constantly, 20/20 vision has finally validated all the conspiracies and the microchips that Bill Gates implanted into you are going to activate anytime soon. Ok fine the soon doesn't come, but it's been proven even more now! Yes, your low quality evidence belief is validated by further low quality evidence, but it's clearly not that convincing to the general population. People who have low standards for proof can't grasp why everyone else won't care about their "proven" worries.
It's not a greater scandal. Websites secretly manipulating their algorithms / whatever results they present is completely normal now.
Ok, let's consider it. In a world where these claims are completely false, I don't expect to see Twitter moderator frontend screenshots getting leaked with accounts being tagged with terms like "search blacklist" or "trends blacklist", and for external tools that check whether an account was shadowbanned to exist, or Google API documentation leaks that show that in their ranking algorithm they keep track of attributes they deny have any relevance (including one literally called "smallPersonalSite".
Yes, it's a great argument! Whether we're talking about the dual wielding Scottish girl having been sexually assaulted by migrants all along, Imane Khelif being a man, transgender medicine not being based on sound science, and the most renowned pro-trans medical association being fully aware of it, and deliberately hiding the fact, the "It turned out it was true all along" argument is popular as it shows how little regard for facts self-styled "anti-conspiracists" have.
If this was true at all, why does the accusation of manipulation against RT have to be so dogshit? If it's normal, certainly there would be better proof than "they started polling the normies"
It's very easy to conceive of them as anti spam bot/impersonation/algorithm manipulation etc measures that you would deploy in order to help hide how fast (and in what ways) you detect them while still not allowing them to deteriorate the typical user experience. This is a pretty common sort of thing in video games for instance, ban waves of cheaters and hackers so they don't know what triggered it.
I imagine basically every single mainstream social media site has such mechanisms (as they are all the constant targets of spam bots and other such malicious use) and thus the existence of them alone doesn't mean much.
Funny then that so many of your examples are still highly debated, even in conservative circles like Khelif. It's so weird how Algeria, a Muslim country with extreme anti LGBT policies to the point that you are probably woke compared to them, does not agree she is "a man".
But yes, this proves all the conspiracy theories are true after all. Vaccines do cause autism, Charlie Kirk was killed by Israel, and a 2019 change to poll casual movie watchers by RT was actually a secret plan by their woke seers to cover for The Odyssey actually failing. In retrospect, they've all been proven because conspiracy theorists have incredible track records.
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