Originally Posted by
Mounttesa
People are suckers when it comes to bikes, even if they're not suckers with their other hobbies. Someone highly critical on a car forum are all of a sudden all about wide, gravel, slack, weight, aero, boost, disc, thru axle, carbon, ti, steel is real, full sus, tubeless blah blah without a critical thought.
i'm a sucker too. It can't tell you objectively why I want Ultegra hydraulic levers and deep carbon rims, but I do. Neither can I tell you that they provide ANY benefits over what I already have.
Every single one of us has a stake in it if we want to break the cycle. Wake up people. Or just enjoy being suckers and have fun with it. Nothing hurts except the wallet.
I'm curious, how do you see the bolded section expressed? The things you listed often lead to contentious threads, but I feel like I see plenty of criticism and more reactions
against trends than blind cheerleading for them.
You bring up an interesting point that most bike choices we make are subjective rather than ones that make meaningful, quantifiable difference to riding. Maybe that's OK, because cycling isn't something we do where it makes sense to eliminate all feeling and emotion. How much our opinions are shaped by marketing, especially directly, I don't know, but it's not like marketing is all-powerful -- it's a lot easier to sell a message that resonates with people who then amplify it. I know disc brake and road tubeless detractors would point to those as examples where it seems the industry is ramming them through regardless of consumer demand, but if they didn't have merit then I would expect some manufacturer to profit from the pushback. They aren't all sitting in a dark smoke-filled room making unilateral decisions about which bikes will be available.