Reddit has started posting purchased 5 star reviews on Apple Store, wouldn’t be surprised if they were doing on Android as well. This is illegal and you can voice your dissatisfaction with the FTC at the provided link.

133 points

If they’re trying to do it in the Google Play Store, it isn’t working. I’ve never seen so many detailed, comprehensive 1 & 2 star reviews for any app. You just scroll and scroll and it’s nothing but people describing in great detail what a turd the app is.

Seems to be all from people who decided to try the official app when spez pulled this crap and discovered that there was a reason no one used it.

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52 points

I’m glad they’re not doing it there… the Apple Store has a bunch with nonsense one line sentences with no grammar or punctuation. One of them even references a different app.

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3 points

I’ve noticed that too after writing my negative review, lots of fake positive reviews. I’ve also seen a lot of negative reviews under recent and the rating is still showing 4.8 for me on the Apple Store

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27 points
*

The rating has dropped from 3.5 stars yesterday to 2.5 stars today, and that’s probably still dropping. Lots of paragraph long, detailed reviews.

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16 points
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I’ve heard this before, but a few days ago I saw it was at 4.2 and today is at 4.0 on Google Play. Am I seeing a different rating than everyone else? I don’t get it.

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17 points

Strange, that’s definitely different from what I’m seeing, I’m not sure why that could be. Google might only show localised review scores?

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2 points

It has a 3.4 rating when I look at it.

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3 points

I think it depends on the region (and possibly type of device?)

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23 points

I’m taking bets on how long it takes for Google to remove those 1 & 2-star reviews because some automated review bombing algorithm kicks in.

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3 points

The 5 stars are being drowned in negative reviews. Filter reviews to 5 stars and sort by recent. Check out the dates and what is said. Not assuming what is happening but it is sketchy.

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34 points

I checked one of the 5-star reviews, at the end:

That being said, it’s nothing amazing. It’s just fine, it does what it does. I have nothing against it.

High praise indeed.

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12 points

Coincidentally, that’s exactly how I describe my toilet.

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2 points

I think my toilet is better than Reddit’s app. And my toilet has a broken thingamajig that means I have to take off the lid and move a lever to get it to flush at least twice a week.

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33 points

Ysk, you can edit post titles in Lemmy

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18 points

I like jumping on the bandwagon as much as the next guy, but do you have any evidence of these accusations?

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17 points

Only the evidence I put in my comments, all of the recent 5 star reviews have no constructive information in them other than a few random words.

They look really suspicious and the FTC would be able to verify their authenticity.

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-7 points
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Deleted by creator
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18 points

I’ve seen a few of what they’re talking about. Sometimes there’ll be a couple random words that make no sense together at all. Or incomplete thoughts.

https://imgur.com/a/QDDcxk8

One of the most recent in the App Store:

Title: I’m going back to work on my Contents: We will have the opportunity

It’s weird.

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13 points

I would agree with you except the actual reviews look really suspicious. They come in blocks of 2-3 next to each other and they are all nonsense. And there’s a fair amount of them.

If this were a highly regarded, honest company I would give them the benefit of the doubt. Having seen numerous examples of their dishonesty in the past month I would say this is par for course.

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4 points

A CEO of a business valued in the billions is unlikely to have mastermind plans to you? Sounds pretty naive to me.

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2 points

Someone posted a screenshot the other day with reviews that were incoherent in a way that only bots could achieve. I agree that there are borderline cases, but even eliminating those, there are some bots reviewing the Reddit app.

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9 points

I put a link below but here is another to a screenshot I took. https://imgur.com/a/QDDcxk8

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7 points

If you go on the play store and look at the 5 star reviews vs. 1 star reviews, is does look a little suspect.

All the 1 star reviews are almost at the character limit, describing in detail why they gave it 1 star.

At least half the 5 star reviews are one sentence reviews like “interesting content”, “Works great! Thanks!!”, “Its good”, “I love it!”, and “veri gud ep” (sic).

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2 points
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11 points

Idk, I just checked the App Store and if you sort reviews as most recent they are almost all 1 star

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-2 points

*Apple Store

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2 points

I agree most of the recent reviews are 1-star. Even so, the app has 2.7M reviews with a 4.8 average rating. The bad reviews don’t seem to be noticeable yet unfortunately.

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