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Maybe what app stores should do is give apps a 3-star "implicit" review by default, when the user downloads and installs the app. This could possibly also be de
by zanecodes 6y ago
Maybe what app stores should do is give apps a 3-star "implicit" review by default, when the user downloads and installs the app. This could possibly also be deleted when the user uninstalls the app.
This way, users who don't feel strongly enough about the app either way to give an "explicit" review are still represented in the app's overall rating, and the impact of early good/bad reviews is diminished.
On the other hand, this would probably cause app ratings to tend much more strongly towards the median, which could make them less effective signals of quality.
- abhorrence 6y agoThis is an interesting idea! You could even add weighting into these implicit reviews so that they are less impactful than an explicit three star review, but would still have the effect of pulling towards the median. It’d help to prevent the “five stars is acceptable, not stellar” problem that these rating systems all devolve into.
- majewsky 6y agoIf you do this, you should probably avoid the 5-star iconography altogether, since at this point, it's too ingrained in our collective mind that anything below 4.5 stars is crap. A good representation for the rating system you describe (where every active install counts as a weak neutral review) would be a like/dislike bar, where the neutral position looks like ----------|---------- and a really good app has a green bar like ----------=======|--- whereas a bad app has a red bar like ------|====----------