Most Controversial Tobacco Blends

[hfearly]

Such a popularity timeline chart would be quite interesting

Unfortunately, the volume of ratings is quite low for most brands when considering a span of 10 years. Nevertheless, there are some discernible events going on, e.g., in the following chart you can actually see the rippled effect of the 2005 switch of Dunhill production, which caused ratings to go down for close to two years. In the same time period where Dunhill plummented, Esoterica gained some love. MacBaren took quite a fall from 2002 to 2006 and I'd assume this is where they gained their reputation for "Mac tongue bite", but I'm glad to see that they are on an upwards trends lately.

 

[romeowood]

Fascinating, Captain. :clap:

 

[Perique]

Great work. Here's another angle: do the number of reviews impact more recent reviews of the blend? In other words, will a popular blend that's been rated many times draw a higher frequency of additional reviews over time leaning towards the aggregate consensus (for better or worse)?
Awesome stuff.
Edit: to clarify my question further: past a certain number of reviews, are subsequent reviews more or less likely to mirror the consensus view? Or is there no impact?

 

[hfearly]

If I understand your question sothron, I'm certanly no math or statistics guy, but it seems to me that numbers of reviews do impact -- 20 bad reviews on a blend with 40 reviews indicates half think it's puppy poo. But 20 bad reviews on a blend with 400 reviews is just a blip on the evaluation radar.

Don't even have to run experiments to answer this. Research done around "Amazon" and "App Stores" have shown quite well that previous reviews impart an opinion bias to customers who are trying to make a decision on a product. Often times you hear the term "buyer's remorse", where a customer who otherwise is content with the bought product has second thoughts on the purchase after reading (negative) reviews of the product.
Good question though, and an important one at that: I can only STRONGLY encourage you to not let yourself get biased before trying a blend multiple times and making up your own mind and form your own opinion. (I guess that's also a pretty good life lesson). For a lot of blends you can tell whether they are yay or nay, if they get a resounding positive or negative feedback from a large number of people.
However, as the main discussion point here is "Controversial Blends" these blends I presented in the OP might be a perfect test bed to answer your question yourself. It might actually be interesting to do a qualitative study as to why exactly some blends are so polarizing. One facet that I present above is a personal bias towards certain tobacco blend types that might not be met (e.g., due to false labelling / advertising / wrong expectations), but there are certainly other factors involved.

 

[bigboi]

I think wrong expectations play a huge part in what people like or dislike. When something is hyped up so much you have huge expectation and when it doesn't meet those expectations you are very disappointed. When if you would have encountered that hyped up thing with out the hype you may have very well enjoyed it because your expectations weren't so high.

 

[misterlowercase]

Damn! This is awesome hfearly! Ask and ye shall receive, you're fast!!!
I think work like this is valuable on multiple levels. I think it transcends market research and enters into a phenomenological field and the "primacy of perception" -- The quality or nature of a given experience is often referred to by the term qualia, whose archetypical exemplar is "redness". For example, we might ask, "Is my experience of redness the same as yours?" While it is difficult to answer such a question in any concrete way, the concept of intersubjectivity is often used as a mechanism for understanding how it is that humans are able to empathise with one another's experiences, and indeed to engage in meaningful communication about them.
Crunching the numbers as you have, and structuring them in such a way as to be easily graspable, can provide an interesting window to glimpse such a vast sociological construct as the psychological territories of pipe-smokers through mathematical mapmaking.
I appreciate your efforts and I thank you.

:clap:

 

[lestrout]

Impressive. I need to puff at least 3 pipes contemplating this.
hp

les