Reddit is buying 5 star reviews.
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  • python@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    They’re also definitely doing some sort of keyword manipulation, cause the official Reddit App is fairly high in the result list when searching for Lemmy.

    On another note: hi, I just came here today after RIF stopped working 👋

  • XiELEd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Lmao I saw a 5 star review that said the official app was “better than any 3rd party app”, that it had “non-intrusive ads”, and asking for an ads toggle for premium users to be able to support reddit. I can’t even tell if it’s some sort of elaborate sarcasm. Wild.

  • Paws@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Currently 2.4/5.0 on the Play Store. Wasn’t that long ago when it was around 4.0. Their rating has taken a beating over the last few weeks.

    • marsokod@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Before the API pricing change, the Reddit app could be considered an internal hobby project made by a handful of employees on their spare time.

      Now that this one is mandatory, it can be rated for what it is.

  • cyd@vlemmy.netEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    After seeing this, I thought I’d go over to the Play Store to leave a 1 star review. Then discovered I had already left a 1 star review (complaining about their shitty interface) a few months ago, which I’d totally forgotten about ;-)

  • Xilly@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I feel like I must be crazy but these reviews do not read like 5 star reviews. Seems super suspect.

    • vanillacadmium@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      You’re right. One specifically mentions ‘would rate this 0 if I could’ so in lieu of that option, they selected a…5?

      Have they gone through and scraped the text from a bunch of real reviews and are reposting them with 5 star ratings to make them look organic?

      • Xilly@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        That honestly sounds to be the likely scenario. If someone saw the review they might shrug it off as an error or mistake.

    • Korkki@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      it’s not just that reddit turned into a huge greedy corpo-clusterfuck when they went public, it was kinda bad before that too and held bad practices. Lemmy has a lot of the same features that made reddit shit on a fundamental level.

      The up-vote downvote system itself is a both a curse and blessing. it’s sorts things decently but it encourages mediocrity and bot like behaviour in people, if one likes to put it that way. It makes discussing anything controversial and where the issue isn’t black or white, impossible. Good for cat pics and tits, but really bad for politics and the like, because everything eventually floats towards some status quo and everybody and everything else is sidelined and encouraged to shut up or go with the flow or face downvote barrage.

      Also the bots are here, not yet, but they will be. Bots are easy to make here too. If this place ever gets even decently popular this place will get astroturfed and up-vote manipulated just like reddit. it’s too easy to manipulated community opinion or shill for issues or things in site like this. Federated structure might help or make it worse.

      • Pankkake@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I hear that instances can disable downvoting in Lemmy’s configuration. Maybe this is some solution to this issue.

      • Paradox@lemdro.idEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        They’re not even public yet lmao. And reddit got started by using bots to post content from RSS feeds to make it look busier than it was.

  • spacemanspiffy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Isn’t buying reviews/fake users something a struggling new startup does, not something that has been around for > 10 years. This is kinda sad (if indeed these are bought reviews).

    Is this screenshot from Apple or Google stores (I don’t know what either look like to be honest). I wonder if the same thing is happening on the other store now too.

    • JasonDJ@vlemmy.netEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Older than that, my account is 16 years old…I came from the Digg exodus and it existed for a short while before that.

  • Determinator@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Can’t say I’m even remotely surprised. It’s unfortunate that even user reviews have become all but useless on most platforms due to corpo bullshit like this.