Reddit has started posting purchased 5 star reviews on Apple Store, wouldn’t be surprised if they were doing on Android as well. This is illegal and you can voice your dissatisfaction with the FTC at the provided link.
This has to be a huge no-no for companies looking to go public. Because they’re intentionally reporting metrics about their app downloads and reviews that they know to be fake.
If they’re trying to do it in the Google Play Store, it isn’t working. I’ve never seen so many detailed, comprehensive 1 & 2 star reviews for any app. You just scroll and scroll and it’s nothing but people describing in great detail what a turd the app is.
Seems to be all from people who decided to try the official app when spez pulled this crap and discovered that there was a reason no one used it.
I’m taking bets on how long it takes for Google to remove those 1 & 2-star reviews because some automated review bombing algorithm kicks in.
The 5 stars are being drowned in negative reviews. Filter reviews to 5 stars and sort by recent. Check out the dates and what is said. Not assuming what is happening but it is sketchy.
The rating has dropped from 3.5 stars yesterday to 2.5 stars today, and that’s probably still dropping. Lots of paragraph long, detailed reviews.
I’ve heard this before, but a few days ago I saw it was at 4.2 and today is at 4.0 on Google Play. Am I seeing a different rating than everyone else? I don’t get it.
Strange, that’s definitely different from what I’m seeing, I’m not sure why that could be. Google might only show localised review scores?
it’s possible you’re only seeing the reviews from your region
Quite possible. Google is indeed clearly massaging the result, most likely according to location. I get a 3.6 score here at the time of this post.
Yep, seems like it. Another shitty thing by Google. So I’m not seeing an average of 2M reviews, the fucking count that’s placed just below the score, purposefully to mislead me, but god knows how many hundreds of reviews of the same old phone model that I use. And who knows how “recent” or how broad that “region” is.
That is such a Google design decision. So pointlessly stupid indeed.
Have to say I don’t see why this is a bad thing. You don’t want your impression of an app misled by 5 million Indians saying “The Hindi translation is garbage 🤬”. Or if you’re downloading an ebook reader on a tablet, you don’t want reviews from smartphone users saying “The mobile version is unusable, the buttons are too small!”
Yes, google only shows localized review scores.
It has a 3.4 rating when I look at it.
I think it depends on the region (and possibly type of device?)
I’m glad they’re not doing it there… the Apple Store has a bunch with nonsense one line sentences with no grammar or punctuation. One of them even references a different app.
I’ve noticed that too after writing my negative review, lots of fake positive reviews. I’ve also seen a lot of negative reviews under recent and the rating is still showing 4.8 for me on the Apple Store
Ysk, you can edit post titles in Lemmy
I checked one of the 5-star reviews, at the end:
That being said, it’s nothing amazing. It’s just fine, it does what it does. I have nothing against it.
High praise indeed.
Coincidentally, that’s exactly how I describe my toilet.
I think my toilet is better than Reddit’s app. And my toilet has a broken thingamajig that means I have to take off the lid and move a lever to get it to flush at least twice a week.
Damn how many laws has spez broken now? Anyone keeping track?
He’s rich AF. The laws don’t apply to him!
He’s not even rich AF. I mean, he’s definitely richer than I am, but he’s not Bezos-level rich. He sold out his one good creation, had thousands of people doing millions of dollars of free work for him, is a tech CEO, and betrayed the people who believed in him, just to become moderately wealthy. Sad!
And you just know this shit is going to follow him for life. Rich people tend to be smart and have long memories.
Can you imagine walking into Cannes and all of the other rich people point, look, and laugh under their breath?
Or walking past /spez’s 45” Bayliner sniggering about how he thinks he’s made it with his ‘yacht’.
If the pitchforks ever come out I would hate to be in his shoes.
Idk, I just checked the App Store and if you sort reviews as most recent they are almost all 1 star
*Apple Store
I agree most of the recent reviews are 1-star. Even so, the app has 2.7M reviews with a 4.8 average rating. The bad reviews don’t seem to be noticeable yet unfortunately.
I like jumping on the bandwagon as much as the next guy, but do you have any evidence of these accusations?
If you go on the play store and look at the 5 star reviews vs. 1 star reviews, is does look a little suspect.
All the 1 star reviews are almost at the character limit, describing in detail why they gave it 1 star.
At least half the 5 star reviews are one sentence reviews like “interesting content”, “Works great! Thanks!!”, “Its good”, “I love it!”, and “veri gud ep” (sic).
I put a link below but here is another to a screenshot I took. https://imgur.com/a/QDDcxk8
Only the evidence I put in my comments, all of the recent 5 star reviews have no constructive information in them other than a few random words.
They look really suspicious and the FTC would be able to verify their authenticity.
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I would agree with you except the actual reviews look really suspicious. They come in blocks of 2-3 next to each other and they are all nonsense. And there’s a fair amount of them.
If this were a highly regarded, honest company I would give them the benefit of the doubt. Having seen numerous examples of their dishonesty in the past month I would say this is par for course.
A CEO of a business valued in the billions is unlikely to have mastermind plans to you? Sounds pretty naive to me.
Someone posted a screenshot the other day with reviews that were incoherent in a way that only bots could achieve. I agree that there are borderline cases, but even eliminating those, there are some bots reviewing the Reddit app.
I’ve seen a few of what they’re talking about. Sometimes there’ll be a couple random words that make no sense together at all. Or incomplete thoughts.
One of the most recent in the App Store:
Title: I’m going back to work on my Contents: We will have the opportunity
It’s weird.
The same should be done for IMDB if anyone can be bothered. I see so much of this for shitty Netflix series. ‘The first episodes kind of suck but it gets better.’ 10/10
-_-
Protip: any TV shows with a boring 1st episode is only going to get worse
I disagree. Star Trek: The Next Generation takes almost 2 seasons to get good. Perhaps TNG is an exception though, not the rule.
You mean Tahsa Yar had to die amd Riker’s beard. For some reason those were the things the show needed to be good.
Bojack Horseman is the exception to this. First season feels like a mediocre Family Guy-type show, then after that it’s just banger after banger.
