"The company reportedly said that Google’s policies explicitly prohibit reviews aiming to manipulate an app’s rating"
Literally the only reason someone rates something is to affect/manipulate the rating.
Literally the only reason someone rates something is to affect/manipulate the rating.
If I say "well, this deserves three stars, so I'll give it a one-star review so as to pull the average closer to three" then I'm aiming to manipulate its rating, rather than rating it.
Note: I'm only guessing at Google's thought process here at the distinction between reviews and manipulation, and guessing at their detection algorithm; I'm not myself suggesting or implying that one-star reviewers are always engaging in manipulation. Of course you could honestly think an app deserves one star. The difference is unknowable to an outside observer. Only you can really know whether you're being honest, but that won't stop Google from assuming the worst.
Such reviews will naturally be at one end of the spectrum or the other - either one star or five stars, so as to maximize your voting power. So they might detect it in the case of reviews being bimodally distributed. I'd expect that two star reviews should always be treated as honest, so I'd recommend that as a review floor to prevent getting accused of manipulation and deleted.
I would speculate that this is the reason that Yelp created its Elite program — to incentivize people to write tons of reviews, including for places that were neither amazing nor horrible. This gives Yelp the crucial middle ground reviews that as you say are more likely to be accurate than just the highs and lows.
They obviously can't, and that's why people are outraged.
Funny that Steam does this too, but I find their reviews quite useful and accurate. Maybe because you rationalize your review and then give it an overall UP/DOWN, vs all these other approaches that ONLY give you the GO/NO-GO signaling...
Why is it a controversy that an app that doesn't let you buy stocks when it hurts insider hedge funds gets rated a derservingly minimal 1 star?
As I suggested in a sibling post, a two-star review should be immune to this accusation, so if I were you I'd use a strategy of "two stars is the new one star".
I understand the argument for removal, since Robinhood likely had no choice but to stop the trading. Ratings are meant to inform consumer choice, so a brigade of downvotes due to some recent controversy/memery is more likely to hurt consumer choice since it reduces the amount of information available. It means that one detail is drowning out all of the others, and regardless of whether a new customer would care about that detail, the fact is that it's the only one they'll be able to base their decision on while those votes stay up.
But on the other hand, app ratings are one of the very few powers consumers have to affect change in companies they do business with. Brigading the rating system (which has the effect of turning away new customers) is no different than bad word-of-mouth, where angry customers go out of their way to prevent others from doing business with the company that screwed them over. Even if a disgruntled customer goes a bit too far with hyperbole, that's their right. And it's a good thing that those things are possible, because it forces companies to always stay on their toes and think twice before doing something to hurt consumers.
It's the question of whether a consumer should have to "suck it up" when a company screws them over, or whether a company, whose full-time job it is to provide a particular service, should be held to a higher standard and be hurt when they provide bad service.
IMO, Google really should have not gotten involved here. This is an issue between Robinhood and its customers, whether or not you think what Robinhood did was fair. Google, a company being investigated for anti-competitive practices, just took another anti-consumer action.
What's going on right now is unprecedented, so it has to go through a complex review process. Just following the news is witch hunting.
They were right. GME , BB, NOK to the moon.
Well, no. Maybe we're splitting hairs but when I rate something its to describe my experience, not to affect its overall rating. At no point do I think my one rating would have a meaningful impact on its overall score unless it has very few ratings to begin with.
Validated app purchase, app-store rating is a democracy.
I absolutely don't.
The math is simple though. Your vote is 1 added to a total. So is everyone's. The totals don't go above 0 tied with 0 based on your description. But clearly our votes don't all end in a 0-0 tie.
I would have to be a complete moron to think my vote had any impact on choosing the winner.
Otherwise, why rate at all?
to describe my experience.
Or just for fun?
Perhaps you want to influence opinion more than you think?