Comment by dmos62
11 hours ago
Tangential, but I'm surprised that people here talk about looks as if it's something objective. I don't like how this car looks, but obviously there are other people with other tastes. I might be reading too much into people screaming "ugly" I guess.
An individual’s opinion may not signify anything, but collectively, all those opinions decide if a product is successful or not.
Absolutely.
Though, we do have to be very careful with interpreting online commentary as representative the collective, when trying to understanding whether something is considered good/bad.
Firstly because only a small proportion of people voice their opinion publicly at all - so only a small proportion of opinions get heard.
Secondly because opinions that are voiced are much more likely to be definitive in nature (it's great / it's terrible) as people tend to be less willing to comment "it's ok" - so vociferous voices tend to dominant online discourse.
Finally, because online communities often represent a niche/specific demographic and so if you only see the views from a particularly online community it's a fair bet they are not very representative.
That's my point. A single opinion is nothing on its own. Further, taste is such a thing where two people can have extremely different tastes, but both be right.
I guess my initial reaction was about presuming that some commenters here are presuming that their taste is the taste everyone has, but a more generous interpretation would have been that they are simply unhesitant to share their subjective point of view. So, I revise my take to the more generous one.