What is Popular or Hyped isn't always Good

I spent some goofing off time over our staycation poking around on Pinterest. I checked out the boards of a few of my knitting friends and I did some searches on various combinations of words for knitting. I was very surprised to see some absolutely amazing pins that came from Ravelry, that I'd never seen before. In some cases they were project photos. The patterns were those with great bones and knit with a yarn which brought out the best view of the pattern. I've already experienced the difference in interest in my patterns based on photos vs. in real life. Typically simpler, often single colour designs are much more appreciated IRL.

I went back to Ravelry and played around with the pattern browser (pictured above) sorting to see how it impacts results when I switched up the sort parameters and in many cases the answer is not very much. I even tried going to the last page of every sort just to see how that worked, in a couple of cases I saw some really nice things on the last few pages of the sort and I wondered why they were so far down in the list.

It made me think of our discovery with Rotten Tomatoes a few years ago. My husband and I would look at the top rated movies when choosing things to watch.  He would also read critic's lists with titles like The 10 best Movies of (name a year) That you Never Saw. We would check them out to discover they had very mixed reviews. After we started watching them,  it became apparent they were often the movies we liked best. They were appealing because they pushed back in interesting ways and were different from the highly hyped potato chip type movies which seem to get the most attention and the biggest ad budgets. I often found I was still thinking about them later.

I've come to the conclusion that what is popular or hyped isn't always the best of what's out there. It's just getting the most attention. It really pays off to look deeper.