This website wants to be the Rotten Tomatoes of YouTube channels
A Reddit user has created a website that is being dubbed the “Rotten Tomatoes of YouTube” for allowing users to review channels on the platform using a five-star rating mechanism.
Rotten Tomatoes is one of the Internet’s most popular websites for movie and TV show reviews.
Its review mechanism is relatively straightforward, with users able to give scores out of five, which get calculated into an overall score. It also provides an aggregate score based on critic reviews.
What sets Rotten Tomatoes apart is that it doesn’t use a regular average or arithmetic mean. Instead, it calculates a consensus score.
When at least 60% of reviews for a movie or TV show are positive, they are “Fresh”. Otherwise, they are labelled “Rotten”.
If a movie or TV show achieves a consistent Tomatometer score of 75% or higher, it may be given “Certified Fresh” status.
Audience reviews work on a similar principle.
When at least 60% of users give a movie or TV show a star rating of 3.5 or higher, it is designated “Fresh”.
Therefore, movies and TV shows rated “80% Fresh” means that eight of ten reviewers scored it at least a B grade (i.e. 70%, 3.5 stars, 7/10).
With Favoree, creator ElDonnintello is attempting to replicate this approach to address a problem many YouTube users have encountered since the platform removed the dislike counter on videos in late 2021.
While YouTube users can still dislike videos, there is no way to see how many others did the same.
YouTube claims it removed the button to clamp down on dislike brigades and protect creators.
Sceptics have argued it is more likely that the company is trying to avoid alienating big advertisers that sometimes miss the mark with their own videos, resulting in widespread mocking by the YouTube community.
The move has also been heavily criticised by major channels on the platform — including tech YouTubers like MKBHD and Linus Tech Tips.
There is a reasonably popular Chrome plugin called Return YouTube Dislike that restores the dislike counter, but it uses archived like and dislike data and likes and dislikes from extension users to calculate dislikes.
Favoree lets users provide a score out of five for YouTube channels and leave a comment providing more detail on their experience with those channels.
Users are also able to tag their reviews with keywords describing the channel’s mood, including “entertaining”, “inspiring”, “relaxing”, “instructional”, or the not-so-positive “stupid”.
Providing input on the site requires creating a profile or signing up through a Google account.
Aside from giving channel ratings and writing text reviews, users can create a watchlist of their favourite channels and get embedded links to the latest videos from those channels.
At the time of publication, the “Explore and review channels” page showed the most frequently-reviewed channels on the site included Tom Scott, PewDiePie, Technology Connections, Linus Tech Tips, Summoning Salt, and Kurzgesagt.
However, because the website is still fairly new, the largest number of reviews — on Scott’s channel — was 58. He scored an average of 4.5/5.
Notable channels with at least 10 ratings that featured among the worst were Jake Paul, Unbox Therapy, and MrBeast, with respective ratings of 1/5, 1.5/5, and 2/5.
Loading ...