Reviews in the wild

substance, significance, clarity, constructiveness, and relevance

we replaced thumbs up, thumbs down with two sets of five-star ratings. One was for quality and the other was for importance.

When I’m looking for some collective intelligence on movies or TV shows that I might want to see, I tend to favor Metacritic over Rotten Tomatoes, because Rotten Tomatoes focuses more on a thumbs up, thumbs down, and Metacritic focuses more on a gradient. And it seems like even though thumbs up and thumbs down might be better foregoing this tendenc... See more

Should you watch that movie / play that game / read that book? The formula is:

[# who rated it 5/5] + [# who rated it 1/5] – [# who rated it 3/5].

This doesn’t apply to everything, but it applies to many things, including media. There are too many options out there to waste time on mediocrity, and everything great will be divisive.