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Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

Apart from the business model: No one ever takes time to write positive reviews of big businesses on third-party sites out of good heart. By default only people who have something to complain about go there. (I know this first-hand based on PlayStore/AppStore ratings of the app I worked on in the past).

The diff between 1.8 and 4.2 business is that the latter sends mass emails to the customers saying "write us a nice review on TrustPilot, and maybe you'll win a $50 gift card". (Although, in case of the app, we just asked nicely, and many people clicked the banner and went on to give 4* or 5* ratings in the store, for free).

Having said that, if company doesn't care about 1.8 rating and has no actions to change, it's probably a bad sign...

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Something I try to do, if I want to write an unfavourable review, is write a few positive reviews for other companies I've had recent positive experiences with first.

I figure that this gives my negative review some credibility, and it also helps the good businesses.

I wonder if actually enforcing this might help things. If someone can't find anything positive to say about five other companies, I don't think I'm interested in their negative review.

We receive many positive reviews after asking customers with the default Trustpilot template to rate us ("how many stars you give us?"), catching them at the point of likely being most happy. Mostly these reviews are brief with just a few words, but many of our customers do not mind spending a minute to give high marks. Some of those reviews even look like we paid for them or hired a bot :) but we can easily trace them to their real accounts.

That's probably true; people are most likely to give feedback if it's negative; making the TrustPilot way of earning money even worse, as it mostly attracts negative reviews. Then companies with those negative reviews have to "buy them invisible" on TrustPilot.

I wish I could give TrustPilot a 1 star review right now :-)

>No one ever takes time to write positive reviews of big businesses on third-party sites out of good heart

Maybe I am missing the context of big businesses, but I will often write a good review of a company (say on trustpilot) I have used, with no reward to myself. Even well known ones. The most recent example being Scan the hardware retailer in the UK. I have though also done it for reward too, so I am not completely altruistic!

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