How many people actually care about Rotten Tomatoes ratings though?

I know of plenty of movies that have terrible ratings from professional critics, but got great box office earnings and all my friends who watched it really enjoyed. There's also plenty of movies with great ratings that I disliked.

Outside of your programmer/hacker/related friends, how many actually look at at the Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic ratings before deciding to view a movie. I know I don't for theater movies.

Take the new Jack Reacher movie, it has mediocre at best ratings, but I really enjoyed it (I must admit I watched it at the cinema for free, and had nothing better to do).

I think that for the average person, exposure is a very effective method of advertising films.

I was using Rotten Tomatoes mostly as a placeholder for all the movie reviews/discussions on sites like Reddit, niche film-focused communities, etc.

I personally go by the Reddit discussion on /r/movies. It usually tells me if the movie is going to be worthy my time or not

That figure of speech is known as Synecdoche, btw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche