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Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

i can only imagine the amount of trash reports they'll get.

"I clicked on this ad on facebook and bought something that never arrived!" Help i've been scammed!

"Why is this amazon product late??" Amazon App is a scam!

"They messed up my chipotle order and the app doesn't allow me to report the order as missing something".

I know none of these are really apple's fault/responsibility. But ask anyone who works in customer support - there is a really long tail of people who actually thinks all apps are by apple and apple should offer support.

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This is why fraudsters do not fear report options. The high incidence of false positives and noise to signal guarantees a high threshold will of reports will have to be met before any action is taken, giving the scammers enough time to profit before action is taken.

In this case though it can flag a human review.. unlike something like Amazon where it’s harder, more expensive, and takes longer to check if something is a scam

I like the Amazon reviews of, say, a salad spinner that are something like “the delivery van ran into my mailbox! 1 star!”

I miss worthwhile reviews.

They will be getting many trash reports for sure.

The mobile carrier that I use has an app on the App Store that subscribers can install in order to view their subscription, change subscription plan, and view past and present bills/invoices. The app itself is pretty good, it's snappy and easy to use. Only shortcoming is that they have a widget that comes with the app but the widget doesn't work and they have been aware of this for a long time without fixing it.

Anyways, I was looking at the reviews and most were positive. But then there was one review that stood out. A one star review, and get this – the review was complaining about something totally orthogonal to the app itself. They were complaining about the prices of the plans the carrier is offering. The pricing of the plans that your carrier is offering is not relevant to managing your plan through this app.

These kinds of irrelevant complaints are sure to show up in reports too, like you say. But let's hope that the amount of those will stay relatively low.

If you read HN posts about Apple or Mozilla or Zoom over the past couple years, this exact behavior is wildly popular here too. Our commenters will hijack a discussion about software RAID or crypto to complain about their favorite pet peeves about app store policy or not liking compact mode or whatever.

The mods do their best to keep the discussions on topic, but I sure do wish more of us would agreed with you even when a given topic brings up intense feelings.

Now imagine they feed those reports into some automated system that just starts banning the reported apps. No matter how ridiculous the reports.

And Somehow I don’t believe apple will spend real money (aka hiring people to process the reports) on this.

Exactly!

You do not need to work in customer support to know that: just read reviews on trustpilot.com

Bravo, this is true comedy. Punchline: Trustpilot is essentially a paid referral service.

> "I clicked on this ad on facebook and bought something that never arrived!" Help i've been scammed!

That's not a bad thing. Maybe it'll force ad-supported products to actually review & moderate their ads.

I used to monetize my Android apps with a well known platform that seemed honest. Until I started receiving reports from users that got scammed by some ad publishers using the platform, even got one of my apps suspended due to porn ads! This is not the fault of devs and it's really difficult to avoid.

> This is not the fault of devs

If you include 3rd party software in your app, and that 3rd party software does something bad, then that's totally your fault.

> 3rd party software does something bad, then that's totally your fault

Apps in stores are 3rd party software as well, so it's Apple and Google's fault?

Why did you quote my sentence without including the first part? It completely changes my statement.

Apple and Google do not automatically install or run 3rd party apps from the store. If they did, then yes, obviously it would be their fault, but they don't.

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