Great apps and stupid reviews

[N_LaRUE]

I did find the title Camera 360 a little bit misleading.
Wasn't there an article on WPCentral about this already? Please refer here : Consumer review etiquette on the Windows Phone Store

The title is about the app control, not about being a panorama camera app. Also the description of the app says absolutely nothing about panorama.

Also yes there was an article on WPC but I'm referring to 'stupid' comments that do nothing but decrease ratings and the ability to remove them.

 

[N_LaRUE]

The problem with what OP said is who is trust enough to remove/judge the spam reviews. No one I would say. Google just recently added the capability for app dev to respond to bad reviews but not removing it. I think this is a step towards right direction. But only time will tell.

I'd say reviews in general are not very accurate anyway. I trust 1 star review as much as 5 star review. Both can be totally bogus and ignorance from the reviewer.

Some are obvious. A 1 star rating that says nothing or is completely meaningless is spam in my eyes. Why should that review be there to bring down the rating of the app when it doesn't add to the overall improvment or discussion?

 

[JerseySal]

You can also tell some developers are playing games too. When users named ghdjkhfdfjk, dsjfsdlfh, and fvbiwerifaui are giving 5 star ratings, you know they're creating accounts in order to boost their ratings.

 

[willied]

I have seen developers give themselves 5 stars, and they make it pretty obvious, too. But I do think spam/nonsensical reviews are definitely a bigger problem. We should be able to rate if the review is helpful or not at the very least.

 

[foxbat121]

That's what app rating system for. So now we need another rating system to just rate the existing ratings of apps? Don't you think it is redundant and probably not going to work out either?

The same spammers and idiots will practically make the new system as flawed as the original one.

Answer: the community.

A voting system for reviews, designed correctly, could help us get rid of most FUD.

Sent from my RM-820_nam_canada_246 using Board Express

 

[a5cent]

That's what app rating system for. So now we need another rating system to just rate the existing ratings of apps? Don't you think it is redundant and probably not going to work out either?

The same spammers and idiots will practically make the new system as flawed as the original one.

Maybe you should look at Amazon who have been using that approach for years.

It's already proven itself in practice. Nothing new.

 

[foxbat121]

Maybe you should look at Amazon who have been using that approach for years.

It's already proven itself in practice. Nothing new.

I did and found that Amazon's rating system is useless as well to me. Nothing worse than a 5-star rating on a new product you used just for one day. Not to mention ppl often posted wrong rating/reviews on wrong items due to duplicate listing on similar items sold by different vendors.

The truth about usefulness of a particular rating system is amount of community involvement. 1 spammer/***** out of 10 user ratings can indeed severely skew the rating. 1 spammer/***** out of 10,000 will not affect product rating at all. And it is very obvious who is the spammer or ***** there. Same goes for review of the rating. If participation rate is low, the review rating can be easily skewed as well.

I think Google's approach that let dev to respond to the bad reviews is a better solution, IMO.

 

[Abdul Rahman Noor]

I agree some (okay, LOTS of) reviews are unhelpful and sometimes outright stupid, but giving *anyone* - especially the developer of the app - the ability to delete reviews is definitely a step in the WRONG direction:
What's to stop devs who make lousy apps (and there's plenty where that came from) from deleting perfectly honest reviews that aren't in their favour?
Review ratings like what Amazon has ("1 of 29 people found this review helpful") help to some extent, as would the ability to comment on a review.

But I fail to see the rationale behind needing a huge, complicated review review system because it doesn't take a genius to see that the "Not free? 1 Star" reviews don't make sense.
We're not robots to blindly average all ratings and think something that has a 2.5 star overall is a bad app. People really must learn to read through a few reviews before making a judgement.
(The official YouTube app being a great example of bad-app-turned-awesome that still looks pretty bad ratings-wise)

 

[a5cent]

I did and found that Amazon's rating system is useless as well to me. Nothing worse than a 5-star rating on a new product you used just for one day. Not to mention ppl often posted wrong rating/reviews on wrong items due to duplicate listing on similar items sold by different vendors.

The truth about usefulness of a particular rating system is amount of community involvement. 1 spammer/***** out of 10 user ratings can indeed severely skew the rating. 1 spammer/***** out of 10,000 will not affect product rating at all. And it is very obvious who is the spammer or ***** there. Same goes for review of the rating. If participation rate is low, the review rating can be easily skewed as well.

I think Google's approach that let dev to respond to the bad reviews is a better solution, IMO.

Okay, we've apparently made very different experiences with amazon. Possibly because we don't look at reviews for the same kind of products? For books I find review ratings very helpful. Never looked at a review for consumer electronics... never will.

 

[foxbat121]

I never bought any book on Amazon. Mostly electronics stuff.