By: Natalie Johnson

A recent documentary about a public figure achieved a very high audience score on one platform, based on a large number of ratings. On another site, the same film had a significantly lower rating. Critics and viewers seemed to have differing opinions, even though the film was released at the same time, leading to two completely contrasting verdicts depending on where you looked.

The gap wasn’t subtle, and it wasn’t easily chalked up to taste. It raised a question that’s been building across the entertainment industry for years: if the same piece of content can look like a masterpiece on one platform and a trainwreck on another, what are these ratings actually measuring?

For Chris Pearcey, founder of the ad-free entertainment discovery platform decisio, that question isn’t rhetorical. It’s the reason his company exists.

The Plumbing Problem

“This isn’t about politics,” Pearcey says. “It’s about plumbing. The infrastructure behind how ratings get collected, weighted, and displayed is broken in ways most people never stop to think about.”

Here’s how. Rotten Tomatoes, owned by Fandango, lets users who purchased a ticket through the platform leave a review, whether or not they actually watched the film. That opens the door for bots or coordinated campaigns to buy tickets in bulk, inflate scores, and, in the process, generate ticket revenue for Fandango on purchases no one ever redeems. Commercial incentives and rating integrity run through the same pipe.

Pearcey spent over a decade leading product and engineering at Nike and Amazon Web Services before launching decisio. He frames the problem as structural bias rather than ideological bias, and the distinction matters. Ideological bias implies some coordinated agenda. Structural bias is quieter and harder to spot because it lives in the business model itself: platform ownership concentration, commercial incentives tied to ticket sales and ad revenue, and the way critic scores and audience scores get segmented and surfaced to serve different purposes.

“Rotten Tomatoes used to highlight anything that scored well,” Pearcey says, referencing his own analysis of the platform’s social media output. “Now the majority of their posts orbit major studio releases. Nobody’s advocating for the viewer anymore. Everyone’s advocating for the studios.”

The Scrolling Dead End

That pattern extends well beyond one company. Netflix interprets watch completion as enjoyment, even when viewers fall asleep with a show running in the background. Streaming services recycle the same catalog under fresh cover art, dressing up old inventory as new discoveries. Review bombing and review inflation have both become standard tactics, and for the average person scrolling at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday, telling organic sentiment apart from manufactured consensus is practically a coin flip.

Pearcey cites studies suggesting that a significant portion of streaming subscribers give up on their search altogether when choosing what to watch, while many rely on recommendations from sources such as apps, websites, or personal suggestions. But the systems feeding them those recommendations are tuned for engagement time and ad revenue, not satisfaction.

“It reminded me of the Planet Fitness model,” Pearcey says. “Built on the assumption that most paying customers won’t fully use what they’re buying. If everyone actually watched everything they paid for, infrastructure costs would explode. The entertainment economy is accidentally incentivized to keep people overwhelmed.”

Swipe Instead of Scroll

Pearcey’s answer is decisio, an ad-free, bias-free discovery platform built around a patent-pending four-way swipe system. Users swipe right on something they’ve seen and liked, left on something they’ve seen and didn’t enjoy, up on something they haven’t seen but want to, and down on titles that don’t interest them. Each swipe captures both viewing history and intent, which Pearcey considers the crucial missing variable in every other recommendation system on the market.

“A movie with ten perfect ratings from ten viewers sounds great until you find out ninety other people swiped ‘no interest,'” he says. “That’s not a universal hit. Traditional platforms can’t tell you that. We can.”

What comes out the other side is four clean categories of signal: people dislike this, low interest, people want to see it, and people love this. There’s no ten-point scale to overthink, no critic weighting to decode, and no commercial pressure deciding which titles float to the top. Users get personalized top-five recommendations within minutes, starting with movies and shows, with books, podcasts, and games rolling out over the coming months.

Decisio’s early traction suggests Pearcey is onto something real. Since launching on January 1 with almost zero advertising spend, the platform’s daily swipes jumped from around 1,900 to between 6,000 and 7,000. 10% of new users come back more than 10 times. Average swipes per user climbed from 40 to 190, and a handful of power users have crossed 9,000 swipes in a single week.

“When people feel like the system is actually listening to them, not nudging them toward whatever benefits the platform, they go deeper,” Pearcey says. “Trust drives engagement more than manipulation ever could. That’s not a philosophy I’m selling. It’s what the numbers keep showing us.”

The Bigger Bet

Pearcey sees the implications stretching well past his own app. Discovery platforms rebuilt around transparency and genuine user control would change the math for the entire content economy. Streaming services could layer in unbiased preference signals that surface what audiences genuinely want rather than what a marketing budget paid to promote. Publishers and podcast networks could reclaim real discoverability in markets choked with volume. Consumers could start trusting recommendations again, not because algorithms got smarter, but because the incentive structure behind them finally got honest.

He doesn’t pretend one app will rewire an entire industry overnight. But the early traction points to something the entertainment world has been slow to accept: people will engage more, and more honestly when they believe the system on the other end actually respects them.

“Entertainment should feel delightful, not engineered,” he says. “We just want to give people what they actually want, in a format simple enough that finding it feels like the fun part.”

It’s a modest pitch for what amounts to a structural indictment of the recommendation economy. But decisio keeps asking a question the rest of the industry has been content to dodge: what happens when the ratings people rely on stop being real? Sooner or later, someone would build the answer. Pearcey decided he’d rather not wait.