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Comment by tristanc | Hacker News Reader

Could somebody please explain to me how TicketMaster on the iOS App Store manages to supposedly have 1.8M(?!) reviews averaging 4.8 stars when all of the written reviews I’ve scrolled through have 1 or 2 stars?

Do they trick people into reviewing the app favorably or something else?

I had a terrible experience with their app and don’t understand how they’re managing to game the App Store rating system.

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So there's a mechanism for asking a user for a rating from inside the app. Apple locks this down so you can only ask the user 2 times per year but how it usually works is. Occasionally a window will pop up asking if you like the app. Press yes and you are prompted to rate it with this popup window, press no and you get directed to send feedback.

This way they ensure that only users that are already satisfied with the app rate it and don't "waste" the popup on unsatisfied users.

Sometimes it's even worse, they'll have you "rate" the app within the app.

Only if you click 5 stars are you then redirected to the app store for the actual rating, for which the slightly confused user presumably just clicks 5 stars again

I thought this was disallowed in the guidelines.

Same, my recollection was that that used to be the case but Apple told developers they could not, in this particular way, be deceptive assholes anymore.

I've seen apps completely ditch their current target group for something else (like bunq, a Dutch fintech company that targeted banking Nerds (we have an API!), then pivoted to Hipsters (we have #insta inside our banking app!)), that go from 4.8 to 1.8 stars over-night and boom, 2 days later they're back at 4.9 claiming users love the new app (oh and we hid the forum a bit deeper in the app, we don't want new users to come across that helpful community that turned into a list of complainers over night!)

I don't trust the appstore reviews anymore.

I mean how can this be: https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/bunq/id1021178150#see-all/revi... ?

That's not great, but it seems like the information is actually there, just not exposed very well.

The ratings are very broadly 80% 5-star and 20% 1-star, so technically 4.2 is right. It's just that it's massively bimodal rather than mostly 4-star reviews as you might expect (which you can see if you look at the histogram) and that recent reviews are overwhelmingly bad (which you can't directly see, but those new 1-star reviews seem to be the featured ones).

Right now the app developer chooses with each new release whether to keep existing ratings or restart from scratch. It would be better if the users get to decide (i.e. actually see the chart of ratings over time) and/or it's automated somehow (e.g. if there's a big step change in the latest release, that gets detected and highlighted automatically).

TicketMaster might actually compete with Comcast for the most universally reviled company in NA. It's as if every single component of their business has been designed to piss off their customers. I'm aware that, for TM, it's much more that event planners and venues are their prioritized customers, but I'm at a point in my life where I will refuse to go to any event that uses TM. TM could easily make their systems work better, but they just feel no need to out of naked greed and market capture.

I work for a ticketing company (not TM) and can confirm this is 100% true. We are completely beholden to our clients and as long as I've been working here our entire roadmap has been a reactionary, ever-growing list of demands from clients and potential clients with little to no consideration of the customer experience.

The whole industry operates on exclusivity of inventory (in this regard, Comcast and other ISPs are quite apt comparisons), so it simply does not matter how much customers hate the company selling the tickets, because their only options are to buy from them, buy at a higher price from scalpers (or the increasingly popular scalping platforms), or not attend the event at all. I think you're pretty rare in your commitment to the third option.

I used to prefer buying from scalpers because paying more for a simple experience was easier than TM.

Even if you make it through the crazy fees and whatnot, they spam you. If I buy a ticket from some random ebay seller, that doesn’t happen. I risk ticket fraud over the definite unhappy experience of using TM.

You can reset your rating with a new release so maybe it's something to do with that, I've never actually tried it but maybe it keeps the total review count but resets the average stars?

Then that's a very deceptive model on the part of Apple, since then it's certainly not "4.8 stars from 1.8M ratings".

I might be wrong, I've never actually tried it, last time I looked the explanation on how it works is unclear which is pretty on-brand for Apple-Developer relations.

I wonder if this has to do with US/other country regulations on what is allowed?

Not sure where you’re from, given the 1.8M reviews I’m assuming US. In the Dutch app store, the TicketMaster has a 1.7 based on 171 reviews. 171 reviews seems low since TicketMaster is also the biggest company selling tickets here.

So then I imagine the count is based on the reviews since the last rating reset.

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