Given that ANY request for advice on equipment is going to result in everybody piling in with whatever is their favourite, for whatever reason, isn’t the question a waste of time?

Has anybody ever bought anything as the result of paying attention to what other people like on this forum?

for bike bits people are often just looking to have their choices validated.

the ‘life’ advice threads are far more interesting and likely to lead to a different decision, imo.

Some guy called Sam told me to buy a swift, Its class.

I had excellent advice on a stereo a while back. Turned out to be the right advice, too.

I tried chilli with chocolate in as a result of effusive recommendations from here. It tasted like chilli with chocolate in, i.e. I’d rather eat my own earwax…

Given that ANY request for advice on equipment is going to result in everybody piling in with whatever is their favourite, for whatever reason

Can that reason not be that they’ve tried the rest and settled on the best? Shirley that reason is a good enough one, to post their answer…

Anyways it only advice on the internet, your all STW (internet) Bots!
I is the only real person here!

Has anybody ever bought anything as the result of paying attention to what other people like on this forum?

not from any single thread, no. Like you say, often these threads are full of people who are essentially justifying their exorbitant purchases rather than knowing from experience that their bling is better than this or that bling.

I suppose the more useful threads are “does this fit on this frame?”, ‘how wide does tyre x come up on rim y?’ or ‘can i convert this hub to 12mm?” etc, ie questions with definite yes/no or ‘quantity’ answers which manufacturer’s websites can be a bit vague about.

Also ‘what tool for this part/job’ and ‘oil weight/height for this old/obsolete fork’ ones can be very helpful.

And I suppose if you read here often enough you can (with caution!) get a more ‘meta’ sense of certain products that are consistently ‘ok’ (lezyne pumps, hope hubs, slx) or consistently poor or unreliable.

Woppit, how does the reliablilty/subjectivity of advice/experience about bikes on here compare with components/cables etc on hifi/audiophile forums? I bet that gets pretty hot-headed too if the occasional hifi threads on the chat forum here are anything to go by. (do they ever discuyss bicycles too i wonder?) 😀

Can that reason not be that they’ve tried the rest and settled on the best

Or, conversely, they’ve tried the rest and settled on the one that their mates like, or that they think looks coolest, or that identifies them as in with the in crowd, or that they could afford, or that they couldn’t really justify in terms of price but they needed it to look good in the car park… 😉