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Comment by quantummkv | Hacker News Reader

That's how reviews are supposed to function. If the users are outraged at the app for what they feel was wrong behavior by the app and it's associated service, they are entitled to it. Just as I am entitled to leave a glowing review if the issue does not affect me.

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Every product has a defect rate and outraged customers are the most likely to post reviews. Therefore a product is likely to have an overrepresented proportion of negative reviews. This is a tricky problem to correct for. I'm thinking about this more in terms of Amazon reviews, where they perhaps factor in the rate of returns when deciding what and how many reviews to delete.

that just means the reviews skew lower, not that they need to be 'corrected for'...

If a good product has 1K 'bad reviews', and a crap product has 10K 'bad reviews' - the system it working.

Anything else is just gaming the system to inflate review scores across the board.

When I shop for products on Amazon the problem is such that more or less all reviews are negative. In that case it doesn't matter if it's 1k or 10k, they simply drown out the positive/neutral reviews, even though I'm pretty safe to ignore the "this product was DOA" reviews. The review incentive structure is fundamentally broken.

eh - you can actually read all the reviews by rating...

if you feel only 3 star reviews are valuable, amazon lets you read just the 3 star reviews. If stuff is being 'drowned out' its because your trying to read all 500 pages of reviews?

To me, a much bigger problem is the fact that reviews on amazon are for totally different products then whats being sold (Sellers 'recycle' pages and change the product being sold - allowing them to keep the reviews and ratings)

So basically - I have to read the reviews 'most recent' first anyway..

> Every product has a defect rate and outraged customers are the most likely to post reviews. Therefore a product is likely to have an overrepresented proportion of negative reviews.

If I buy a product or a service, and it is defective or not what what was promised or not upto mark, I have the right to complain about it. Shutting down my valid complains because it would create an overrepresented proportion of negative reviews is downright wrong.

It's "wrong" in the sense that you go unheard but "right" in the sense that I can make a more accurate assessment of the product. I care more about the latter and so does the sales platform.

The way this is fixed is by surveying customers and asking for reviews. Being involved in a customer service software Saas, I learned that for most companies, 80%+ of the interactions/transactions with customers are positive. But as you say, most people won’t leave a review - unless you ask them and make it easy for them to leave it. It also helps if you ask them to review a specific person (so they feel like they are helping someone).

What Google Play has done is not the right way to fix the ratio of positive to negative reviews, especially given the issue at hand. It also should be RH the one fixing its own reviews by addressing the problem with its user base.

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