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Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

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Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#121
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "uncontroversial" I mean there is broad agreement among critics that this movie is worth watching. This does not necessarily mean the subject matter of the movie is uncontroversial.

Ah, ok. In that cause I gotcha. I just didn't want it to sound like these films were somehow safe when it came to subject matter.

No, they are just safe enough to not offend critics.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#122

IMHO, journalism is slowly dying. These days you find more "opinion-based" or "make-it-viral" news pieces than proper investigative journalism. Services like this can help but at the same time they can create further segregation of true news vs poor news if most of the critics start growing to be biased.

Journalism costs money. If it is funded by ads, then getting more eyeballs onto the ads is going to trump good journalism every time.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#123

Good luck to them if course, but I am not sure this will work. Couple of reasons come to my mind: 1. How will I know that news have been reviewed by qualified people? Technically this should be news agency/source's job. 2. By the time the score will depict the news' quality, the damage may be already done. 3. RT is based on people's opinions, but news should be fact checked. What I think it should do, is to score the…

Subsidized prediction markets. Unfortunately, they are illegal

How would a prediction market help determine whether a news article about current events is accurate?

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#124

This, and many other concepts based on "vetting" news assumes that the audience cares. A significant portion of the audience does not care, and is instead looking for news that validates their worldview, and furthers their (and their chosen political party's) goals. So basically these services will cannibalize the part of the audience that does care about truth, turning people against each other over marginally skewe…

You're not wrong. But for those of us who want facts and insight instead of entertainment and opinions it would be nice for it to be more obvious where to find that.

I find it pretty easy to find reputable news sources, I don't really need a tool but I guess it could help. It's everyone else I'm worried about. Solving this problem for only people who want the truth narrows the scope dramatically and may in fact make the situation worse, by attacking and discrediting legitimate news sources for a perceived bias.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#125
post #44

I get the methodology but, what is the demand for this type of product? RT makes sense because there are too many movies coming out at any one time, and you need something to build a shortlist from. But news? Are users so spoiled for choice that they need a journalist's opinion on what's worth reading? This doesn't even seem like an anti fake-news play, since the people that consume and share that stuff aren't actual…

presumably it's marketed as anti fake news but the reality is it will be politically biased towards one faction. That's usually how these things play out.

The thing is, even if it's not biased, as soon as something is published which is inconvenient for one side or the other all the partisans are going to claim it's biased. As they already do.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#126
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. RT is based on people's opinions, but news should be fact checked. Except when RT doesn't like to hear people's opinion when it differs from the mainstream. Unfortunately it's easy to box it as "trolling" and hide it under the rug.

If you want to go on a rant, is it too much to ask that you list examples and how they apply, rather than assume everyone here is as on top of Internet drama like you might be? Your examples might even make it clear why a RT for news would be even more difficult than the one that exists for movies.

I guess it might be better to repackage this as something that isn't a rant.

RT is a company that is currently owned by Warner Bros. (through a chain of ownership). This alone is enough for someone to raise the possibility they may not be completely unbiased in how they treat each movie despite having any evidence of such behavior. Conflict of interest, in my own experience, have never required evidence of any further problem outside of the conflict of interest itself. Since the end result is merely movie ratings which is a fully subjective experienced, it isn't worth time digging any further into.

When it comes to a news rating site that will likely be deciding things of a more factual nature (news is true or not, or at least somewhat based on true events), I think a potential conflict of interest has larger implications. Whom ever owns the site will have a conflict of interest with regards to at least some news, and the ability of that site to be used by other groups like non-profits, NGOs, or even governments will need to be limited with respect to where the conflict of interest will occur.

I don't think the difference is in the difficulty of making a RT for news, but on the downstream impacts of the conflict of interest that exists between owner and purpose.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#128

This, and many other concepts based on "vetting" news assumes that the audience cares. A significant portion of the audience does not care, and is instead looking for news that validates their worldview, and furthers their (and their chosen political party's) goals. So basically these services will cannibalize the part of the audience that does care about truth, turning people against each other over marginally skewe…

I think your outlook on the subject is extremely pessimistic and is a strong reflection of your own jaded feelings towards misinformation.

Pessimistic and jaded I will admit to, but how will this help with intentional misinformation campaigns? How will this help with naive/malicious people who knowingly share false information because it aligns with their world views? How will this help stop mainstream media, from taking a "rumor" (aka fabricated / militarized news) and reporting on it therefore making it seemingly legitimate?

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#129

Good luck to them if course, but I am not sure this will work. Couple of reasons come to my mind: 1. How will I know that news have been reviewed by qualified people? Technically this should be news agency/source's job. 2. By the time the score will depict the news' quality, the damage may be already done. 3. RT is based on people's opinions, but news should be fact checked. What I think it should do, is to score the…

These are important limitations, but in the end, if their scoring system helps readers find good, in-depth news articles to read (even if they're not the freshest) then they'll be worth visiting.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it will just leave the system vulnerable to brigading. That even happened on RT for the Captain Marvel movie because of the female heroine, many "snowflakes" got offended and gave a movie that wasn't even out yet bad ratings. Kinda funny how these snowflakes (let me assume white males) call out "SJW"s while meanwhile they themselves actually believe society is mistreating them and so in their rage they're also ex…

> That even happened on RT for the Captain Marvel movie because of the female heroine, many "snowflakes" got offended and gave a movie that wasn't even out yet bad ratings. Alternatively, they were using the "Want to See" feature on Rotten Tomatoes exactly as it was intended to be used. People didn't like aspects of the marketing campaign for Captain Marvel and made their opinions known using a tool Rotten Tomatoes p…

It's strange though... there are so many movies coming out all the time. Way more than you could ever see, even if you wanted to. What drives a person to go to RT to explicitly say "I don't want to see this movie". They don't do that with all the other movies they don't want to see. It's all about politics, and has nothing to do with the quality of the movie.

I haven't seen it, and probably won't, but I have weird taste in movies anyway.

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