Nothing more needs said on this really, but I'll say more anyway, just to discuss.
Good data collection is actually incredibly difficult. Polls, comments, even the SH data in the author dashboard is all imperfect (as almost all data is). Poll data is answered by the type of people who answer polls, not all readers. Comments are written only by people motivated enough to read a comment. The data in the dashboard is the best of these three, but even then has shortfalls because most people just don't have enough readers to collect good data (if you just happen to get 3 readers who decide to binge your entire backlog in a day, it can appear to the author as if their current work somehow inspired this, rather than random chance. It also doesn't show you any data on who isn't reading your story, which would function as a control for your data, something like 'other stories with tags like yours are performing like 'x').
There are a lot of pitfalls in trying to evaluate the quality of your own work through the lens of readers. My honest opinion is that a close friend who can be brutally honest or other author's opinion on the work is much more valuable than all your readers combined.
As a side note, beware of a certain other kind of comment that isn't negative that can also drive bad author behavior. There is a small subset personality type that is overly enthusiastic and vocal about whatever their favorite thing is, whether it's: trains, guns, NTR, LGBTQIA+, or just about anything that classifies as a hobby or political; there are some people who will sing your high praises for writing about something, and often times creators end up leaning into this, since it's often the loudest praise they've received. It's always a subset of a subset, a non-representative microcosm of the total ecosystem.
It's FINE to lean into it if you want to, but you'll alienate a larger potential audience for a more captive small one. That's fine, and many people enjoy that. It's not right or wrong to pander to an audience if you're an entertainer, that's your audience. Too often though, I hear authors on the forum saying "X" or "Y" topic is how you get popular. I've seen just about everything under the sun make trending at some point. It isn't a rule to pander to a particular audience to get popular. You do, however, need to reach some audience, whatever it may be.
So, beware of survivorship bias, and what that implies for comments and other data you collect. More often than not, in my experience (anecdotal evidence, just as bad as a comment, ignore statistical relevance) the negative comments people write aren't often even spurred on by your story at all. Often, the actual reason the comment was written was because the person was already having a bad day, and this was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
If you've browsed trending enough, you'll occasionally find a story that does one particular thing wrong for every type of thing. A story with terrible formatting at the top of trending. A story with terrible grammar. A story with bland/flat characters (mine #1 2x). A story with no coherence. Yet they made it to the top of trending, despite comments and reviews that point this out. 99% of the time, most readers will glaze over issues with no problem. They only give negative comments when other stressors in life really push them to the breaking point.
