It’s unlikely many of the sites and writers that get featured on a site like Rotten Tomatoes would have many other means of getting the word out about their reviews and unique perspectives on movies if not for the aggregator sites that feature their work. It’s a symbiosis of sorts, with the aggregator using the data from a film review site for their averaging purposes but the review site also gets access to a readership that presumably exceeds their own. In an era where there are more voices than ever competing for attention, being offered this window into the world of interested readership is vital to a person who just wants to be heard, and has something to say. And they could be the one with the most interesting take on a given film, for all we know.
The internet has provided opportunities for all sorts of crowdsourced projects, and gathering opinions on movies to identify a current of thought that runs throughout these opinions is one of the many uses this approach can have on the general conversation about movies. That’s the nature of the times we live in. There is no single person who can dictate the dominant view on anything anymore. We don’t have a Walter Cronkite everyone blindly trusts who will tell us who we are and what we think about things. We get to determine for ourselves who we are. But at the same time, as we define our own opinions about things, we can commune with others to find common opinions and perspectives in order to identify that which is relatively universal. It’s in this way that review aggregator sites show that critics are better together. We just have to keep in mind what they’re meant to do, because they do it tremendously well and offer a very useful service for those of us obsessively interested in movie opinion.