re the title: From a signal/noise perspective, yes. If they hate everything equally, they are emitting no signal.
If they have unrealistic standards, but grade things differently from "shlock" to "pitiful", then they're being rude but are emitting signal...
re the body: Opinions are pretty much always worth something; but context is important. A critic who rates a work in the context of classics presents one point of view, and is implying they have a sophisticated history of experience to compare against. However, such critics can easily become jaded, or insensitive to merits in new content (and, paradoxically, blind to this shortcoming).
The reviews I find completely useless are those from someone whose tastes are orthogonal to mine and who post a review like "I loved it!!!!1!" with no details. Again, zero signal.
If you're between that situation and "has the same tastes as I have, and reviews exactly the way I would have", there's a sliding scale depending on what angle and overlap of opinions there are.
no subject
From a signal/noise perspective, yes. If they hate everything equally, they are emitting no signal.
If they have unrealistic standards, but grade things differently from "shlock" to "pitiful", then they're being rude but are emitting signal...
re the body:
Opinions are pretty much always worth something; but context is important. A critic who rates a work in the context of classics presents one point of view, and is implying they have a sophisticated history of experience to compare against. However, such critics can easily become jaded, or insensitive to merits in new content (and, paradoxically, blind to this shortcoming).
The reviews I find completely useless are those from someone whose tastes are orthogonal to mine and who post a review like "I loved it!!!!1!" with no details. Again, zero signal.
If you're between that situation and "has the same tastes as I have, and reviews exactly the way I would have", there's a sliding scale depending on what angle and overlap of opinions there are.