As I get older, I realize more and more that few people actually come to their own views on a lot of issues, including something is inconsequential and personal as their choice in entertainment. They often can’t even figure out on their own if something is good or if they like it - they just try to absorb whatever the popular opinion is in whatever group they want to conform with, and the experiment you reference is exactly the sort of thing I’d like to test out.
Another example - I sometimes make similar comments on reddit on similar issues, and sometimes they get highly upvoted, and sometimes they end up with a total of like -8. The difference in audience and content isn’t that different, so I really think this is one of those things where the first person to either upvote or downvote starts others conforming with their opinion. I would love to run an experiment on reddit where the same content appears as being +4 to some people and -2 to other people and see how it influences subsequent upvotes and downvotes. My guess is that the plus comment would keep going up, and the minus comment would keep going down.
Entertainment-related, I saw this live during the game of thrones final season. Before public opinion turned on it and now it’s the worst thing ever with nothing redeeming whatsoever, people were celebrating and cheering the resolution of one the big plot lines early in the last season, even though the resolution was really kind of shitty. But we were still in the “yay, game of thrones is great, 10 stars!!!” phase. Then, later, over subsequent episodes, public opinion started to turn, and now it’s the worst show ever! 0 stars! And I noticed that the rating for that episode I mentioned went from being very highly rated to very poorly rated as people went back and changed their votes once public sentiment turned against the show.
This isn’t intended to start a conversation about the final season of GoT, I’m just saying I saw from real time people following what they thought other people thought of it, and retroactively changed what they thought of it accordingly to match.
In fact, on reflection you would expect most reviews to graph to a normal distribution, maybe skewed more if much better or worse. You don’t. Instead, and puzzlingly, they are almost always a J-curve with lots of 5s, some 1s, few 3s. And exactly for the reasons you say. You could pick almost any random item on Amazon and it would be true.
In addition to social factors, people with average experiences simply do not often write reviews, and people motivated to purchase are also motivated to defend their purchase.
Thats hilarious you should bring that up cause thats one example I can think of where I was wrong about a movie or song etc…and will admit it.
BITD my criticism was “Tombstone is just a collection of Hollywood tropes. Wyatt Earp is the superior film.”
Well, I was a big Costner fan then, and still like his old stuff…and Wyatt Earp is still a fine film, but more importantly: Westerns are SUPPOSED to be bigger then life!! With bigger then life characters!!
I still haven’t seen Tombstone in its entirety, but its a more entertaining film then Wyatt Earp. And the story of Tombstones production and how Russell shadow-directed it is fascinating.
I also find it funny he named one of his kids Wyatt, as did I. But not for the movie, but because we were looking for a Rustic name, so his first and middle name is Wyatt Austin
“These possums don’t play dead, they play for keeps.”
“This time, you’ll be the one playing dead…until you’re dead for real.”
To answer the OP, yes, I read bad reviews of things I like. Art is subjective enough that I can often appreciate the point of view of a bad review while disagreeing with it. There was a movie reviewer in one of our local newspapers many years ago whose opinions on movies were so diametrically opposed to mine that if he gave a movie a bad review I knew I would enjoy it.
When it comes to reviews of things I might purchase online, I take a quick note of the overall rating, then go directly to the one-star reviews. That’s where the real story is. However few one-star reviews there may be, if a few of them mention a specific problem with the thing it will give me pause. If the one-stars all say dumb stuff like “product arrived damaged” or “took too long to deliver” then all systems go.
A phenomenon that I find curious, though, is that often it’s self-identified “fans” who are the harshest critics of a particular work, particularly in a franchise. Consider the Star Wars prequels. Most people saw them when they were released, either liked them or didn’t, and then more or less forgot about them. It’s only the “fans” that kept up the drumbeat of how horrible they were. The same is true about Episodes 7-9, perhaps even more so. That level of hate is only coming from within fandom, because “fans” are the only ones who are still talking about them. The larger audience just saw them and then went on with their lives.
All those people who are whining about how Star Trek has become too “woke” would insist that they are fans. What they really are is fans of a particular version of Star Trek, possibly a version that really only ever existed in their memories. They see the current shows as the attack on their identities, and rather than let the franchise grow and change, they insist that it has to remain the way they imagine it “always was,” or else it’s not really Star Trek anymore.
In the case of Star Trek, it’s particularly ironic. When I was a young man, during the heyday of TNG, you couldn’t get Trek fans to shut up about “Gene Roddenberry’s vision” of a positive, utopian future where prejudice had been banished and equality had finally been achieved. To hear some Trekkers talk, you’d think that Roddenberry personally invented the very idea of racial harmony. That Star Trek was progressive used to be a point of pride among fandom. Now it’s suddenly “They’ve gone woke!”
That, I suppose, is a long preamble to say that I do read negative reviews of things that I like, but I do my best to limit my reading to those reviews that actually have something to say and make an intelligent argument. Occasionally I may even admit that the critic has a good point, and is seeing something that I hadn’t considered before.
But if it’s just someone complaining that it doesn’t conform to 25 year old “canon,” or that it has gay characters so now it’s too “woke,” I don’t waste my time.