Show HN: Tomatotree.tv – Find your next series to watch using Rotten Tomatoes

by hauxir • 5 years ago

51 32 5 years ago

Why do people take that site seriously? Just look at its name - "Rotten Tomatoes". It was always meant to be a parody website, not for actual reviews.

wcarss2• 5 years ago

It seems like you might not understand the purpose of the website, and have made an assumption based on the name. Rotten Tomatoes is not a satire or joke site, it is just a review-aggregator, like metacritic is for videogames. It boils media down to 2 metrics: the % of positive reviews by actual critics, and a % of positive response from audiences.

I'm not certain how the audience score is calculated, but the review score is pretty simple. It's also a more interesting metric than just a mean score (which is hard to calculate anyway, given the mix of thumbs up/stars/bags of popcorn out there in professional reviews), because a middling-score actually indicates differences of opinion about a movie, i.e. that many critics said good things overall, and many said bad things. That kind of split may point to a movie actually having a unique perspective or feature!

soylentcola• 5 years ago

I mainly use it to surface interesting things I might have missed otherwise. I generally disregard anything with an abysmal rating since it indicates just about everyone had a negative opinion. Likewise, if both critics and audience are 90% or more positive, I might just check it out, even if it's not in my usual "wheelhouse".

The rest is just finding interesting movies/shows that would otherwise fly under my radar.

dancemethis2• 5 years ago

No, they don't understand the purpose of the name.

It will always be a satire and a joke in the heart of the individual who will others well.

rpmisms2• 5 years ago

Rotten Tomatoes has consistently been an excellent inverse indicator of what media I'll enjoy. A low critic score and high audience score means it's probably fun, see Venom for an example.

hauxir8• 5 years ago

Well, then you can sort in reverse ;)

rpmisms2• 5 years ago

I don't grind leetcode, I don't know how to reverse sort a linked list. :(

nobrains• 5 years ago

Yeah that works for me as well. But I usually ignore critic score and I have noticed that audience score always/mostly correlates to the series/movies that I end up liking.

wcarss2• 5 years ago

One request: allow searches by name/role, e.g. performer/writer/producer/director.

For example, when I started to pay attention to these things, I noticed that Greg Daniels show-ran or co-created The Simpsons (during its golden era), King of the Hill, The Office, and Parks and Recreation! So I keep an eye on his newer projects, just in case they end up as defining elements of pop culture for the next decade.

Similarly, past collaborators like Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, Office Space, Silicon Valley), Michael Schur (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place), Bill Oakley+Josh Weinstein (Mission Hill), give a great way to branch into similar-ish content, especially when paired with ratings, filters, etc. like you have here. I already sometimes go wandering through imdb or Rotten Tomatoes for exactly this kind of information, to build up "family trees" of co-creators+writers of the best stuff, so tools to enable that would be awesome.

CharlesW• 5 years ago

I think this is a really solid idea for "what should the next filter be?"

hauxir8• 5 years ago

agreed!

monkeywork• 5 years ago

Would be great to filter by number of seasons

Falling32• 5 years ago

Looks very cool, but I couldn't use it without changing the body background color. The red you're using is borderline painful.

hauxir8• 5 years ago

darkened it a bit. better?

Falling32• 5 years ago

Better, yea. Here's the color I used, which has a little less saturation: #d9534f.

eyeinthepyramid• 5 years ago

Do you have an agreement with Rotten Tomatoes? I believe RT started blocking Justwatch when Justwatch was scraping the RT scores.

flatiron• 5 years ago

the 100s from rotten tomatos throw it offf i think. i believe those are probably very niche shows with only a few reviews

cjdell• 5 years ago

I like this, but living in the UK the Netflix / Prime Video suggestions are mostly all invalid for me due to different country content rights. If there was the option to pick "Netflix UK" (for example) this would be perfect. (Yes I know I could faff around with VPNs, but most people won't :)

frankbreetz• 5 years ago

This is Awesome! I have thought about building something like this, but never found the time.

Could you tell us about the tech you used? how did you collect the data? how often is it updated? How do you store it?

I'll definitely be using this.

Here are some notes:

If something is the "Netflix" network does that mean it is a Netflix Original or just on Netflix? It looks like everything has just one network, so I would assume the former. You may want to add what streaming platform it is on, if you have that data available, because that is all people really care about.

It looks like everything always has only one Genre too, but they could be more then one. Here is an example: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/jungle_cruise

hauxir8• 5 years ago

Data is scraped from RT and stored in SQLite. It's updated once a day using a python script and the data is then used to generate a static HTML.

The network and genre are as displayed on the website. It seems series usually only have one genre on RT.

keroro• 5 years ago

Could you add the ability to toggle between tv shows and movies?

hauxir8• 5 years ago

It's only for tv shows

gramakri• 5 years ago

There is a 'null' as the last item of the category filter dropdown

aloofgrunt• 5 years ago

Thanks for making this. One suggestion: I want to be able to bookmark a search so I can go back through the results later. Maybe serializing the search settings in the URL would be helpful.

nonameiguess2• 5 years ago

Have you considered trying to work with Rotten Tomatoes? This kind of functionality should really be built into the site. They actually have top X of each year by category pages, but the categories and years are hard-coded to single values, don't allow drop-down filtering, and don't allow ranges. On the other hand, their rankings are more reliable because they adjust raw scores by factors like the number of reviews and ranking of the critics giving the reviews. You might consider doing something similar if you can scrape that information as well.

hauxir8• 5 years ago

Absolutely agree that it should be built into the site.

The whole reason I created this was because I was frustrated using their UI while searching for something to watch last Saturday and ended up creating this.

Agree that the scores could be more accurate, right now it just takes the scores as is, but I guess that can be improved upon by weighing number of reviews and ranking as you said.

dumindaxsb2• 5 years ago

This is very useful. Thank you for making this.

I was going to suggest a dark theme, then I thought why not making one for you (not perfect, but a good place to start): https://pastebin.com/vzA11EG3

Cheers!

hauxir8• 5 years ago

I've open sourced it.

Feel free to make a PR ;)

https://github.com/hauxir/tomatotree.tv

dumindaxsb2• 5 years ago

Cool! I just made the PR :)

Good luck with the project.

hauxir8• 5 years ago

The project is now open source:

https://github.com/hauxir/tomatotree.tv

Show HN: Tomatotree.tv – Find your next series to watch using Rotten Tomatoes

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