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Skip The Critics
Real audience scores. No critics. No review bombing.
We read real people's reactions to every new movie and video game, score them, and tell you straight what's landing and what isn't. No critics. No paid shills.
Hey PH, I'm Chris.
Here's the core idea, and as far as I know nobody has done this 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 get performative, or self-selected, or brigaded.
But people's honest opinions are already out there. Someone telling their friends the movie they just saw fell apart in the last act.
Someone forty hours into a game complaining the servers still don't work. Nobody asked them, they have no idea anyone's counting, they're just talking. That's the most honest review data that exists, and no score has ever been built from it.
So that's what Skip The Critics measures:
Every night it reads real, unsolicited public conversations about movies and games, across social media, works out who actually watched or played the thing versus who's repeating drama they saw somewhere, and turns it into a score plus a short plain-English summary of what people actually think.
The summary is the part I care about most. A number can't tell you "the lead performance is carrying it but everyone checks out in the first hour." The summary can.
Some things worth knowing:
- It's really hard to brigade. Every post counts for very little on its own, copy-paste spam gets thrown out, trailer hype doesn't count toward the score, and "I heard it's bad" counts way less than "I watched it last night."
- For games it also reads Steam reviews, which come with proof of purchase and hours played. So for games, "did they even play it" has a real answer.
- The summaries aren't allowed to make things up. If a detail didn't show up in the actual data, it can't go in the summary. Drafts that fail that check get thrown out and replaced with something more boring that's at least true.
- Everything re-scores nightly and every page has a chart of opinion moving over time. Watching launch hype cool off into reality is weirdly satisfying.
- Anything at 40 or below gets stamped "Certified Slop." Not sorry.
Nobody's posts get stored or quoted anywhere. The system reads them, counts the opinion, and throws the text away. Nobody can pay for a score. No ads, no accounts, it's free.
There's also a news page now, short movie and game news articles with the sources linked on every story.
If a score looks wrong for something you've actually seen or played, tell me. Feedback from people who watched the thing is what tunes this.
Thanks for checking it out, and feel free to ask me anything!
honestly love the no critics angle, but it'd be really helpful if you added a way to filter by platform, like only seeing game reactions from people who actually played on PC or console. that way the scores feel even more relevant to what you're about to experience
Loving the idea of cutting out the middleman and hearing from genuine viewers. One feature that would be great is a "consensus shift" timeline showing how sentiment on a game or movie changes over the weeks after launch, so you can spot when the early hype fizzles or a slow burner picks up steam.
About Skip The Critics on Product Hunt
“Real audience scores. No critics. No review bombing.”
Skip The Critics was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 8 upvotes and 5 comments, placing #160 on the daily leaderboard. We read real people's reactions to every new movie and video game, score them, and tell you straight what's landing and what isn't. No critics. No paid shills.
Skip The Critics was featured in Movies (15.1k followers), Games (98.7k followers) and Data & Analytics (5.7k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 32.5k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Skip The Critics?
Skip The Critics was hunted by Chris G. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Chris G