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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

What's this one called?

You do a video call on some service, like Messenger or WhatsApp or Zoom.

After the call, you get a popup asking you about the quality of the service, on a 5-point scale.

If you click 5-stars, it says "thanks" and lets you go.

If you pick one of the others, it does the whole "oh help us do better, please fill out this form" spiel which is obviously a lot of work.

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There's also the extended version of this, where they'll ask you about the service in-app and only prompt you to exit the app and leave a review on the store if you say you love it, pre-vetting their reviews.

Can't you just ignore it? Don't they just want feedback to improve their product?

I'm asking what it's called

It’s called user research

I wonder if they record less than 5 stars if the user doesn't submit the text box, or if their research says everyone has great quality because they close/decline to provide feedback.

Qualitative research is finicky like that. What I’ve seen happen more often is a user is frustrated yet professional enough in some moment to actually provide useful feedback, but they bail when the survey has one too many questions. UXR teams like to organize questions and answers into nice little spreadsheets that ladder back to KPIs, but that’s not how an emotional person with honest criticism wants to share it. So they bail and you lose that moment. I like to do stars or thumb up/down as a pulse check, then a textbox to spill your guts. More work for me, but useful results more often.

The thread is fishing for some kind of moral failure, but if it's the company gathering those opinions, without any obligation, for its own use, it's not hostile behavior to manipulate the data.

It's just stupid.

(There may be, of course, some behavior that is hostile to the company done by people inside it. But it's not hostile to you. Also, one can argue that "stupid" is worse.)

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