The Star Trek Series Ranked by Fans ( i.imgur.com )

StillPaisleyCat , 10 months ago

I find these kind of articles that validate Rotten Tomatoes (RT) audience scores as a quotable source are a problem, objectionable. Especially for Star Trek fans who embrace IDIC values.

Why? Because the RT audience ‘stats’ give a false credibility to a very biased and unscientific sample.

Many folks here on the fediverse are very cautious and savvy about how bias in AI training data leads to bias in the AI, but still quite RT stats as though they are somehow credible or scientific.

Rotten Tomatoes base of users has been established to be even more male, white American and older than even Reddit (that itself is 2/3 male). (The critic score is biased to American sources but some major ones from other countries do make it in there.)

When we look to RT’s audience score as some kind of authority, and share that, we’re giving weight to the voices of that specific demographic group over the rest of the audience.

47_alpha_tango OP , 10 months ago

Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are some of the only ways to gauge opinion of the masses but yes both have their problems. But with the lack of alternative we have to make do. I did say in the post that they are also open to review bombing but they still rather accurately reflect the opinion you often see from fans online with the newer shows in the bottom half of the list with Discovery plumb last.

roofuskit , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

They're not the only way. They could weight the audience scores to match the demographics of the greater population so that the imbalance becomes balanced. They have the data, just not the will.