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Comment by metafunctor | Hacker News Reader

Some people here would probably call that a "dark pattern" (I of course don't). Because, you know, it's soliciting for positive reviews from a preselected set of users.

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Yeah. I wish Apple implemented that star-before-redirection thing and captured the rating. Then if you liked the app, your fake 5 star review would help them without having to actually write a review, AND you'd be getting honest feedback from everyone, not just a filtered subset.

I don't know why people write AppStore reviews though. If I like an app, I'll go on my computer and tell people via social networking. Typing out a credible-sounding review on my phone sounds like work, not fun.

That's actually coming with this update too. It looks like this [1]

> Using the SKStoreReviewController API, you can ask users to rate or review your app while they're using it, without sending them to the App Store.

[1]: https://twitter.com/iCalvin/status/823977790382993409/photo/...

As far as I've seen, happy user have little incentive to go and leave a good review. But the users who have had some annoyances with the app are definitely going to take it to the reviews. This leaves you with negatively biased reviews a lot of the time.

Not a dark pattern at all. There are no interface tricks

Yeah - however, the whole "do you like our app? yes/no" thing, where yes takes you to the store for review and no takes you to a feedback form (that probably doesn't even post)? Definitely a dark pattern.

The advantage of a feedback form is that the developer can come back to you with suggestions, ask you for details to reproduce a bug, etc. If you just go to the App Store and leave a (negative) review, there is no way for the developer to contact you. Hence the dialog/feedback form pattern. Allowing developers to respond to reviews on the App Store will help with this problem.

I'd wager it probably won't help at all. Developers have been able to reply to reviews on the play store since 2013 - yet applications are still rife with this kinda shit, and not just the older ones that haven't been updated since.

but what if I dont want to give any feedback at all? When I am using an app, I only want to use the app, not rate it, and not giving feedback.

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