Methodology

Rotten Tweets answers one question per title: what are ordinary people saying about it? Every number on a title page can be traced to public posts that you can open. This page says exactly how. Last reviewed 8 October 2026.

1. Where reactions come from

Only open, documented sources that allow this use, without logging in and without paying anyone. Every request identifies itself as RottenTweetsBot with a link to this page, waits between calls, and follows robots.txt; a source that blocks us is switched off, not worked around.

Not used: X/Twitter (its API is paid and scraping it is against its terms — the 195,000 X posts this site collected in March–April 2026 are archived and not used in any score), Reddit (commercial use needs Reddit's written approval), Letterboxd, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (their terms forbid automated collection), YouTube comments (YouTube's policy forbids derived scores).

2. Which posts count

A post counts only if it names the title as a title — capitalised like a name, or as its hashtag — so “that did so much damage” is not a post about Damage. Short or common names (“Sugar”, “Mayday”, “To The Rescue!”) also need a context word such as movie, episode, Steam or gameplay close to the mention. Only posts their authors marked as English. Piracy spam (“watch full movie free”) and long hashtag lists are dropped. Posts from the title's own official accounts are listed but never scored.

3. Positive, negative or neutral

Steam reviews carry the reviewer's own thumbs up or down; we use it as is. Everything else is labelled by an AI language model (DeepSeek V4 Flash, on a private inference server), asked for the post's attitude to the title; news, questions, plot talk, passing mentions, comparisons, lists and posts about something else are neutral. Labelling is slower than collecting, so each run labels the most-liked unlabelled reactions of every title first; the rest wait their turn and are counted on the page as “waiting for a label”. Only labelled reactions count toward a score. If the model is unavailable, the VADER lexicon is used instead and the reaction says so. Every reaction on a title page shows its label and who made it.

Hand check before any score. Before a source's labels can move a public score, a person reads 100 of its positive/negative labels drawn at random and marks each right or wrong. A source needs 85% or better. Below that its reactions are still listed (marked *) but do not count. The current results are in the table above.

4. The score

score = positive ÷ (positive + negative) × 100, over reactions from sources that passed the hand check, excluding official accounts. Neutral reactions are counted and shown but never move the score. We show no score below 10 opinionated reactions, and we publish a 95% Wilson interval next to every score so a 90% from 12 posts does not look as solid as a 90% from 1,200. Labels: 75%+ Loved, 60%+ Fresh, 40–59% Mixed, under 40% Rotten.

Every title page shows the counts behind the score: “n reactions from k sources”, the newest post date, when the page was last updated, and a per-source table. Games also show Steam's own all-language rating, which is Valve's figure, not ours.

5. The written summary

For titles with a score, an AI model drafts a short summary from up to 40 reactions sampled in proportion to the real mix of positive and negative posts. It may only use those reactions. Code then checks the draft before it is published:

• every paragraph must cite at least one of the reactions it was given — uncited paragraphs are deleted; each [n] on the page links to the original post;
• every quotation must appear word for word in the cited post — any that doesn't is removed;
• claims about real people or companies (developers, studios, cast) must be attributed — “some players say…”. A sentence that states such a claim as fact is deleted; a one-line verdict that does so is replaced with a plain count.

The summary is rewritten when the number of opinionated reactions moves by 20% or every 14 days.

6. Critic context and metadata

Where Wikipedia has a reception section, we show an excerpt labelled “Critics, per Wikipedia” with a link and the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. It is context only and never part of the audience score. Titles' descriptions, dates, genres, cast and directors come from Wikidata (CC0) and Wikipedia (CC BY-SA, credited on each page); games add Steam's store data. Posters are shown only when the image is freely licensed on Wikimedia Commons (credited under the image), or for games published by indie.io, which owns its art. IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic figures, where shown, come from OMDb.

7. Freshness and indexing

Bluesky, Mastodon and Steam are checked about once a day per title, Lemmy about every two days, Wikipedia weekly. Scores are recomputed hourly. Pages with fewer than 10 reactions are kept out of search engines until they have enough to say something. We monitor how many new reactions each source delivers per day; if any source drops to zero for 24 hours we are alerted.

8. Removal and corrections

Posts are quoted from public profiles with a link back. If you want your post removed, or think a label is wrong, use the contact page with the link to the post. Rotten Tweets is run by indie.io, which also publishes games; indie.io titles are marked “Published by indie.io” and are scored by exactly the same rules.