Do you still trust audience scores? I stopped, so I built something different (launching tomorrow)
I've spent months building Skip The Critics and it launches here tomorrow.
The idea, which as far as I know hasn't been done before: every review score you've ever seen comes from asking people to rate things. Critics get asked for verdicts. Star ratings get solicited on review sites. And the moment opinions are solicited, they turn performative, self-selected, or brigaded.
But people's honest opinions are already out there. Someone telling their friends the movie fell apart in the last act. Someone forty hours into a game complaining the servers still don't work. Nobody asked them, they're just talking. That's the most honest review data that exists, and nobody has built a score from it.
So that's what this does. Every night it reads real, unsolicited public conversations about movies and games, weighs people who actually watched or played over people repeating drama, and turns it into a score plus a plain-English summary of the consensus. For games it also counts verified Steam reviews, proof of purchase and hours played. Anything at 40 or below gets stamped Certified Slop.
Two things I'd love takes on while I sweat the launch:
When was the last time an audience score actually matched your experience?
What would it take for you to trust a score again?
Come find us on the board tomorrow and tell me which scores we got wrong. That feedback is what tunes the system
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