My Love/Hate Relationship With Reviews

     As you probably gleaned from the title of this blog post, I have a love/hate relationship with reviews. Reviews of all kinds: book reviews, movie reviews, product reviews, recipe reviews. I love reviews because they can sometimes help me come to conclusions; whether I should read a book, whether a website I'm ordering from is reputable or sketchy, whether a recipe tastes good, whether a movie is worth my time. I also love reviews because they often times give me more information than the thing itself provides me with. For example, on Goodreads, the given description of most books is only a short paragraph long, so I'll scroll through the reviews and usually find a review that summarizes the book with more in depth detail. Or if I'm looking up a recipe, I often find reviews that give suggestions on how to alter the recipe to accommodate more people, or make the food richer or more healthy, etch. So I really appreciate the helpfulness aspect that reviews have. The reason I hate reviews, though, is because I take them too much to heart. And as with anything, a thousand good reviews can be wiped away in my mind with just one bad review. So then what it really all boils down to is the fact that reviews all need to be taken with a grain of salt because they're written by people, and most if not all people are bound to have different opinions than me! This is something I often forget. I assume that if someone writes a hateful, misanthropic review of a book that I was really pining to read, then I would obviously share the same negative opinion upon reading said book, and therefore should just forget about it completely. But obviously (or at least this SHOULD be obvious) I have different taste in books than other people do. And it's not like I know anything about the person doing the reviewing! If I knew them, and knew what types of things they liked and if they had similar interests to me, then it would make sense for me to trust their opinion so steadfastly. But honestly, reviews are just voices in the void from people who you'll never know anything about. And without actually knowing someone, it's impossible to predict whether their opinion of something will line up with your opinion of something. So I really need to readjust my approach toward reviews. I need to stop taking them at face value and considering them ultimately true. Because I don't know the faces and personalities behind the reviews themselves. Just because Sally H. from Arkansas thought the cookies came out flat and too salty doesn't mean I'LL think that. And besides, Sally H. could have been having an off day in the kitchen and accidentally added too much salt and not enough flower without noticing it. Plus her oven is probably different than mine, and it's highly likely that she used different brand products than I did. Plus (and this one is a wild wild guess) maybe she just has different taste buds than me???? You know what I'm saying? You shouldn't assume that every internet user is an authority on the thing they're reviewing and you shouldn't assume they're right or that your opinions will align with theirs. Because everyone is different. The main point of reviews is to help you come to your own conclusion based on several opinions and ideas about certain things. This is something I really need to think about more often when I'm reading reviews.

-VaughnDL