I've seen my parents use this site before for the purposes of "checking on" games before I play them, and the results are laughable. The main reviewers on the site- those who are paid to do review the games, are terribly biased.
The main premise of the site is a place for parents to talk about and review media (as the name suggests) and share the ideas to the public, which works on paper, but everything has become terribly colluded.
I once read an article on their site about the "Top Ten Worst TV Shows For Kids" and Nick
S Fred was very high on the list. Fred was notorious for his YouTube career in the past, but the Television Show was quite tame. Most parents hated it for how annoying the character was, and though I agree with them, the site had no reservations when it came to bashing every single thing that was "bad for kids", when it truly wasn't.
(Spongebob was on this list. Are you kidding me?)
This goes for the game-by-game, website-by-website reviews as well. For example- there are two similar games called Animal Jam and Club Penguin- two MMOs that are built for kids and can be perfectly safe when used properly. As someone who has had experience with both games- one is obviously better than the other (coughanimaljamcough) but the parent who reviewed the site gave Club Penguin the better rating in Safety and Learning. This makes no sense to me as the Disney team hasn't updated their filter in years- you can say shiiiiiittt and other variations of swear words, but you can't say 'war', lol.
In the Learning category, it was given a 3/5, even though it has no educational content whatsoever, even Animal Jam has more educational tidbits than the Disney game. One of the selling points is actually the "education" aspects lol
I realize that turned into a bit of a rant about two reviews, but this circumstance applies all over the site.
There are, though, positive aspects, as there are negative ones. There are a handful of genuine reviews on the site, if you're willing to dig for them.
I also understand that this is a site built for concerned parents of young children, but really, take everything you see here with a grain of salt.
Thanks,
Whitehat
UPDATE:
I forgot to mention that I saw someone from the website commenting on an article about how to use a Proxy Server, haha. The typing style was very similar to one on the site and it drove me up a wall just reading it- the user using the official Common Sense account was ranting about how kids shouldn't have freedom on the internet. It made them come off as very standoffish. Not really the way to represent your website;)
But a good read if you like comment flamewars!