[bluefirebrand]

> One observation I've made is that any story I first see by advertising is probably bad, even if I later see it elsewhere - if it were actually any good, I would've seen it in one of the non-advertising-based mechanisms first

A similar observation I've been finding lately is that if something is highly rated by critics and lowly rated by audiences, it probably sucks

I think the current batch of book/movie/game critics out there writing reviews are largely out of touch with what many people enjoy. They don't write useful reviews for consumers anymore

There's always accusations of review bombing being the culprit of such skewed scores, but even after sites claim they've culled all of the bad faith reviews, the ratio almost always still exists

[ghaff]

>A similar observation I've been finding lately is that if something is highly rated by critics and lowly rated by audiences, it probably sucks

Perhaps there is less skew today given that film critics are probably less a high-brow big city newspaper thing overall. But certainly I wouldn't expect the average Friday night young cinema-goer to have the same tastes as the film critic for the New York Times.

[bluefirebrand]

I would expect the New York Times film reviewer to be able to deliver a review that would give the average Friday night young cinema goer a good idea if a film is worth their time, even if they aren't a film snob

From my readings of many film reviews lately, a lot of them really talk down towards people who are not as into cinema as they are

[o11c]

There certainly are review-bombing campaigns, which can be known with certainty when caught at the same time and from the same source as review-boosting campaigns.

Most bad reviews are well-deserved, even if they make the author feel bad. In particular, "people shouldn't downvote if they've only read 5 chapters" is an invalid complaint - as an author, your duty is to write a strong start! (I suspect some of these are actually tagging/description failures, but that's also the author's responsibility)