Obvious to anyone using the site or aware of is ratings, including the author, but it is good to see some analysis as evidence.

I will say that when I used to go to the theaters, which was before the pandemic and I started a family I used metacritic.

I found that any time I went to something that was red, I absolutley regretted it and it was terrible. Yellow was more hit or miss and top green scores were pretty good.

Exceptions were comedy where a lower score could still mean a good film, and politics oriented films, where a bad film with a media approved message could get a really good score even if it sucked.

It’s sad to not get a reliable indicator of that and someone should just resurrect the old score and call it Bad Apples. Since the actual score seems transparent, why not develop a competitor.

Would there be some selection bias as well? As info about movies becomes readily available, generally the people who go see movies would have decided that they would probably enjoy said movie, and write favourable reviews

Regardless of the introduction of sycophantic reviewers, the 3/5 = fresh thing has always been a pretty half-ass threshold imo, and that a fact that a film can be "100% fresh" on RT on the basis of every single reviewer saying "yeah it's nothing special but it's fine, 3 stars" is fairly easy to misinterpret.