[agent008t]

It is more of a lamentation of the fact that people's opinions of things are significantly affected by the perceived popularity of those things. I guess the benign explanation is that people are more likely to invest time into something that is recommended by many people they believe they have a lot in common with, but I think it runs deeper than that.

I suspect it applies to a significantly lesser degree to the HN audience, who know well that unpopular things can be well worth investing the time into and so for whom popularity is less of a useful metric; if anything, popular things tend to appeal to the lower common denominator and so popularity is often a negative indicator.

[donkeyd]

> and so popularity is often a negative indicator

And that's what bothers me so much about those types of people, disliking because something is popular and then thinking that's better than liking something because it's popular. They're just doing the same thing, but they're following a different crowd. A more negative, gate keeping crowd at that.

I've never liked Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones was popular. Those things are separate facts and I will never go on the internet to tell people that Game of Thrones was bad because there's some obscure book or movie that might have some resemblance to the story line. I just didn't like it, I ignore it and enjoy the things I do like. It's really that simple.