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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

It would seem trivial to pivot Moviefone into a film rating website. I wonder how difficult it would be to disrupt Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic.

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Trivial? Trivial to build a site, populate it with critic content for each movie, as either text or scores that seem credible to a particular audience type? Or trivial to carve out market share from Rotten Tomatoes/Imdb/Metacritic?

Both really, but I meant the latter. People don't really trust Rotten Tomatoes (and IMDb and Metacritic are memes at this point). I'm sure Moviefone's parent company has a few mil to spend.

Maybe you should read the article. The full headline is:

"Moviefone, Worth 1% of Its Former Value, Is Being Run by One Employee After Parent Company’s Bankruptcy "

Trivial to use cash-on-hand to buy a small existing movie reviews site and rebrand it.

The real challenge is to build a reliable reviews mechanism, then resist the temptation to sell it to media companies.

IMDB moved from a respectable site to a parody of itself for that exact reason: they didn't resist and today their reviews are complete garbage. They got to the point of removing the comments section altogether when users found how to spot fake accounts that were created just to give bogus ratings.

IMDb is owned by Amazon (from Apr 1998), which explains the lack of concern about quality user reviews.

Rotten Tomatoes has been suffering the same fate, as it's now owned by Fandango (from Feb 2016).

> IMDB moved from a respectable site to a parody of itself for that exact reason: they didn't resist and today their reviews are complete garbage.

We're IMDB reviews ever good? I used them from fairly early on, but only for actual factual (mostly vast/crew) information, the reviews were always, AFAIR, pretty useless.

Check out criticker, it's awesome. Very simple but effective algorithm using bucketing and similarity scores to identify movies you will like. Find it surprisingly accurate.

https://www.criticker.com/

Fully agreed; every time I happen to watch a movie recommended by a friend or so, I come up with a score and then check the site's predicted score, and it's always within 5%, usually less!

Plus it has recommended some obscure gems, like Branded to Kill.

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