On Tuesday, May 14, 2013 5:08:34 PM UTC-7, b0b wrote:
> > That's true for some of them, however most users are also good at > discarding clown or iditiotic comments. > Probably, but I don't have hard statistics on the size of most vs some, as a percentage of those who visit the page. IF I had to guess, 10-25% of people could be dissuaded if there are 1 good, 1 bad, and 1 mediocre comment vs 3 glowing positives in the top 3 comments. Without the ability to isolate all factors, of course, most developers here have seen a slump in downloads when the most visible comments are. I don't think many marketing people would disagree that the three most visible comments have more weight than the ones they have to work harder to find. Which brings up your next point . . . On another subject, what baffle me is that for an app that get much more > good reviews than bad by a large margin, it looks like Google will favor > bad reviews to put in the top 3 (and they can stay there for a while). Like > if Google found it fun to make developers look bad by putting bad reviews > in front. > A bigger change than the reply to comments feature was the default sorting of comments by "helpfulness". A bigger change would be if it actually worked. Some time back, you were at the mercy of whatever three people commented last. The biggest trolls knew and exploited this fact to the point they would even say "I will update this one star comment every day until I get my demands in this app". Now, well, you are at the mercy at what Google decides. Their algorithm seems to prefer to have at least one negative comment on the front page. Fun may not be the intent - they may wish to make their store look more credible by showing a bit more variety. Studies show that both positive and negative reviews increase buying behavior - for the store as a whole. But that can be at the expense of individual apps. I don't believe for a second that what is shown is a true reflection of what people have voted as the most helpful. It may be one of many factors, but it doesn't even appear to be the dominant factor. Example: "Invents a new way of displaying RSS feeds that is far from intuitive" Trouble with this comment, as I mentioned in my reply, the app doesn't show any RSS feeds and they probably meant to review another app. There is no way a large number of reasonable people voted this comment as the most helpful of all time. Even if they don't like the app, there are plenty of better, true reasons. Yet this comment was front page news for a week. Nathan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
