Even if Rotten Tomatoes wasn't being manipulated by production companies, looking at a score aggregator is such a bad way for people to judge movies.

A movie where ten critics go "It was fine I guess." would score 100%. A movie where seven critics said "This is the best movie ever." but three said they didn't care for it would score a 70%.

Shallow crowd pleasers with no sharp edges are going to have such an easier time scoring highly than well made but niche movies.

It just seems like a situation of industrializing the concept of enjoying media to assign it scores in, essentially a void (because honestly most people just check the numbers instead of reading the reviews making them up.)

I miss when Roger Ebert was alive. I could just check his opinion, and it would 99% of the time tell me whether a movie was worth watching.

Trying to find a good barometer these days is really hard.

Whenever I check for a movie on RT, I go towards the capsule reviews of critics, never just the superficial score in big bold numbers.

Any metric that becomes a goal.