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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

#191

Post by beat »

goto11 wrote: post #176
beat wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully half that list is movies from the 20th century, going back as far as 1920. I think it's a flawed list in many ways (especially the lack of non-English language films, missing masterpieces like Tarkovsky's Stalker ), but it doesn't seem to be driven by mere popularity or advertisement.

Popularity and marketing is a factor to the extent that lesser known movies will not get enough reviews to count. Note that some movies gets ranked lower despite having a higher percentage. E.g Citizen Kane has 100% but is ranked several steps below Black Panther which has 97%. This is due to Panther having more reviews so the confidence is higher.

Well, we tend to review what's new, not something from decades ago. Different process. It's unsurprising that there are more software-countable reviews of contemporary movies.

Black Panther, to use the example some are protesting here, is a perfect storm of recent (max accessible reviews), critically acclaimed, and wildly successful commercially.

I think it's more telling that recent Star Wars movies like The Last Jedi are on the list, but A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back (which are more important imho) are not.

This is one reason I like the standard set by the Cocaine and Rhinestones country music podcast. He won't talk about 21st century music because we don't have enough distance to tell what's truly great from what's merely popular at this point. A couple of decades of reflection really separates the great from the trendy.

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

#192

Post by chocolatebunny »

wutbrodo wrote: post #175
TeMPOraL wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse. For most people, news is just a social object. Something to talk about with family, co-workers, etc. Whether or not any particular story is true doesn't matter - what matters is that everyone in their circle is aware of the described event (whether they read the same story, or a different one). Humans are pretty good at fact-checking and critical thinking when getting it wrong means some immediate lo…

That's what I find so disgusting about this tendency of many people. If I don't care enough about an issue to be rigorous about it, then by definition I don't care enough about it to 1) vote based off of it or 2) spread my uninformed opinion about it (when I do talk about it, I'm clear that I have only a tentative, uninformed model of the situation). People have often defended the average voter with "people have busy…

An individual may not be that well informed when voting but the collective of all votes is supposed to average out to something more reasonable. There was a story about a bunch of people who were guessing the weight of an ox in a state fair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton#Variance_and_st...) where people were generally not very well informed but the average weight guessed was pretty accurate. There are a lot of reasons why democracy as it stands today doesn't work as well but I don't think ill informed voters is one of them.

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

#193

Post by darkpuma »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #130
motogpjimbo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ta…

Is politics not a reason somebody might decide to not see a movie? If Mel Gibson produces a great new movie, then during the promotion gets drunk again and makes another racially charged rant to the police, wouldn't that dissuade people from wanting to see the movie? I know plenty of people who never forgave him for the first rant!

Why do movies use famous actors anyway? Not all movies do of course, but many do. Why? Because they're cashing in on the public liking and recognizing that person. Well what's going to happen if the public recognizes your celebrity actor, and dislikes them, for any reason? Isn't that just the other side of the same coin? It has nothing to do with the quality of the movie, but it's the nature of the industry nevertheless. Actors who are well liked for any reason are better for box office performance than actors who are disliked for any reason.

Putting Chris Pratt into your movie does not improve the artistic qualities of your movie, but it almost certainly will make the movie more successful in every measurable way.

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

#194

Post by holler »

darepublic wrote: post #65

Rather than create an RT for news, just create a better news outlet please. A new form of news would be the more revolutionary startup imo. I think any RT style news review site will end up being regarded much as Politifact is today -- valued only by those who agree with its ratings.

what would you like to see in this new news outlet?

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

#195

Post by devmunchies »

josefresco wrote: post #58

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…

Democracy is not the best system for getting the best result. People are fickle. People tend to vote for what they like instead of whats best. That's why there has never been a bald president since the advent of TV even though most white males above 50 are balding.

And, as you said, most people don't care. Its why cat videos or toy review videos get more views than educational or philosophical videos.

Expert curation is better than a democratized system. The problem is how the curators are curated.

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

#196

Post by Bartweiss »

rooam-dev wrote: post #64

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…

I think your doubts are all extremely well-founded, but I don't think scoring publishers is a viable alternative.

There are already a bunch of attempts to list 'trustworthy' news sources, sometimes paired with attempts to offer a "balanced media diet" while avoiding inaccuracy. Unfortunately, publisher-level judgements are fundamentally too broad for story-level relevance. Accuracy varies wildly, and there's a significant difference between publisher-level quality (e.g. biased topic choice) and story-level quality (i.e. if I read it, is it factually correct?) Worse, publishers benefit from keeping it that way, by extending the aegis of a reputable name to content that's fast and cheap instead of diligent, or to inflammatory clickbait that monetizes better online.

Fox is infamous, but their online site actually has a lot of good investigative reporting. Unfortunately, we can't just split Fox.com from television Fox News, because Fox.com also hosts old Glenn Beck videos and other comparable rubbish.

The Huffington Post has hired some good reporters over the years, but their model of saving money with repackaged (or stolen) content effectively launders inaccurate stories from a host of other sites. The difference between their pedigreed staff writers and their news-roundup commentary is immense.

Buzzfeed News moved to its own domain last summer, but before that it was a subdomain of Buzzfeed that produced a whole bunch of award-winning investigative stories from top reporters. Unfortunately, Buzzfeed also does news, and has a history of things like blackholing stories at advertiser request or committing serial plagiarism.

The Washington Post website, like many other news sites, has a section for blog posts by non-regular contributors. A story in their PostEverything section doesn't warrant anything like the same faith their main content would, but its under their 'news' heading and isn't demarcated any differently than staff blogs.

The list of similar practices is painfully long, to the point that I'm struggling to think of sources which don't have major quality discrepancies within their brand. The WSJ, NYT, and ProPublica come to mind; it's no accident that they all trade extremely heavily on their reputations. Television sources, with their numerous distinct shows, are of course disastrous for this - PBS is the only channel I can think of now that History and National Geographic have surrendered.

I don't have a good answer here, but it looks to me like there are strong incentives for publishers not to offer a stable level of quality in their work.

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

#197

Post by root_axis »

ZhuanXia wrote: post #155
daveFNbuck wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It would provide a common prior for any empirical claims. Scott Alexander puts it very well here: A democracy provides a Schelling point, … an option which might or might not be the best, but which is not too bad and which everyone agrees on in order to stop fighting. … In the six hundred fifty years between the Norman Conquest and the neutering of the English monarchy, Wikipedia lists about twenty revolts and civil…

The problem is that there isn't a universally trusted arbiter for the final result. Prediction markets can be useful when what is being predicted can be objectively verified in the future but if something like "Will ObamaCare destroy the economy?" was the question in 2009, in 2019 half the country will tell you it did destroy the economy, the other half will say it didn't.

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

#198

Post by SkyBelow »

Spellman wrote: post #142
SkyBelow wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 furthe…

While that's true for the possibility of conflict of interests, do you have any proof/data showing they've actually flexed that conflict for their own gain? Undermining the trust in the authority of the aggregate values is a huge issue I'm sure they'd much rather avoid as much as possible in order to extract as much value out of the platform as possible. I know a bunch of folks recently complained that they were tryi…

When avoiding a conflict of interest matters, normally there isn't a standard of requiring evidence of any impropriety for behavior to be deemed inappropriate. Merely not avoiding the conflict of interest is enough. Granted, for something like civil lawsuit or criminal charges this alone isn't enough and evidence is required, but for matters such as violating professional ethics not disclosing a conflict of interest is enough.

Like I said, with movies reviews it does not matter (at least in my opinion). The issue I have is that I don't think such a carefree attitude can be taken when it comes to rating the truthfulness or applicability of news.

As for any examples of actions, I do not have access to the sort of data to determine if any such actions were taken, nor do I have the resources nor desire necessary to even begin investigating. Also, especially in relation to recent events that touch on a more political scale, I rather not deal with the issue of evidence being trusted based on the extent it confirms existing views (a cognitive bias common to humanity that isn't particularly worse in this case, but which I have seen result in flame wars on other forums).

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

#199

Post by SkyBelow »

skinnymuch wrote: post #148
SkyBelow wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 furthe…

Pretty unimportant but just clearing up ownership info. Warner Bros/AT&T are minority owners of Fandango which owns Rotten Tomatoes. Comcast/NBC Universal are majority owners.

I was going off my now shown to be incorrect memory. It appears to be too late to edit the comment. Apologies for spreading any incorrect information.

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

#200

Post by goto11 »

michaelt wrote: post #83
dagw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s extremely obvious that “top” means “popular and/or most advertised.” In RTs case, "Top" means films no one dislikes it and everybody thought it was at the very least OK. The "problem" with genuinely great films is that they can often be divisive and challenging and generate a lot of strong opinions in both directions, and thus they'll never rate as well on RT.

Looking at the RT top 100 list, 76 films are from 2010 or later, 6 from 2000-2009, and 18 from earlier. Were films a lot more divisive before 2010?

If you look at the percentages you will notice the older movies have higher approval scores. But the algorithm also weighs number of reviews, and newer have more.
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