Fans treated a one-point Metacritic drop as an unforgivable betrayal

Evidence

But for Taylor Swift’s dedicated “Swifties,” this was treachery. Within minutes of the review’s publication, they vented their fury across social media, blaming the 8.0 rating (which Mapes didn’t personally assign) for lowering Folklore’s overall score from 90 to 89 on ranking aggregator Metacritic. In what The Guardian’s music editor, Ben Beaumont-Thomas, called “this brutally quantified world,” such an incremental downgrade was treated as an unforgivable affront. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 524

Categorization

• SHARE: For a music-nerd friend: the Swifties storming over an 8.0 that Mapes didn’t even assign, framed through ‘brutally quantified world.’