Learn English – What makes something overrated or underrated

meaningword-usage

I'm somewhat confused about what makes something either overrated and underrated. Is this completely subjective, and based only on personal opinion, or somewhat objective, based on similarity to other things or some other measurable criterion? What kind of criteria should one use to determine that something is underrated or overrated?

For example, some people might say that Game Of Thrones is overrated because it's incredibly popular – is the fact that it's popular the reason that it's overrated? If that's so, shouldn't anything that's very popular be overrated? What is the difference?

Best Answer

In my opinion mostly it's a person's opinion that makes something under or over rated to them.

The exception to this is when talking about things that can objectively be valued. For example a house might have market value that is underrated or undervaluated. The same case for stocks, if stocks are considered to be undervalued, then many people will tend to buy those stocks in the hope that in the longer term prices equilibrate or settle back to normalcy, hoping to make a return on investment.

Undervalued is a financial term referring to a security or other type of investment that is selling for a price presumed to be below the investment's true intrinsic value.
Investopedia

Generally if you're talking about any of the arts, I mean in their artistic value, and this includes songs, films, shows, books, paintings, it's a matter of opinion mostly. Although I think it's be hard to argue between this famous piece of post-modern abstract art:

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And this:

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