3 ms·

It's a clever "hack" but it's completely black hat IMO. I would definitely not encourage other devs to do the same, rather I think Google should crack down on

by simias 13y ago

It's a clever "hack" but it's completely black hat IMO. I would definitely not encourage other devs to do the same, rather I think Google should crack down on those behaviours for the good of the users.

ihaveajob 13y ago
There is a number of frameworks to encourage ratings, and they range from honest requests "you've been using this app for a while, would you like to rate it now?" which Appirater does, to a number of shadier ones like the one in this post.
- simias 13y ago
  I think it's interesting that, besides selecting who gets to vote, they ask for the rating very early in the game. I assume at this point you don't need to pay anything to progress correctly in the game, so they want you to rate it before you get to see the pay2win aspects.
e28eta 13y ago
My product does a similar, but not identical thing. We ask the user for feedback (not modally), and if they decide to, we ask whether they like it, neutral, or negative. This is tracked with analytics, so we have an idea what people answer. When first built, the next step was to ask everyone to send us an email with any feedback they had. After about a year and a lot of positive emails, we decided we'd ask the positive users to rate us instead. It doesn't feel black hat to me, but maybe just because we evolved to this point. I certainly do feel uncomfortable with the cynical interpretation: that we're purposefully segmenting our users to avoid bad ratings. I think what EA is doing is different from us because they're using stars, which are linked to App Store ratings for users, because it's 5 stars or nothing, and it looks more likely that they truly are trying to avoid sending detractors to rate the app. But if you squint a little, they are basically the same thing. And it isn't a pattern I want to see takeoff. So, I'm conflicted.

3 ms·

It's a clever "hack" but it's completely black hat IMO. I would definitely not encourage other devs to do the same, rather I think Google should crack down on

by simias 13y ago

ihaveajob 13y ago
There is a number of frameworks to encourage ratings, and they range from honest requests "you've been using this app for a while, would you like to rate it now?" which Appirater does, to a number of shadier ones like the one in this post.
- simias 13y ago
  I think it's interesting that, besides selecting who gets to vote, they ask for the rating very early in the game. I assume at this point you don't need to pay anything to progress correctly in the game, so they want you to rate it before you get to see the pay2win aspects.
e28eta 13y ago
My product does a similar, but not identical thing. We ask the user for feedback (not modally), and if they decide to, we ask whether they like it, neutral, or negative. This is tracked with analytics, so we have an idea what people answer. When first built, the next step was to ask everyone to send us an email with any feedback they had. After about a year and a lot of positive emails, we decided we'd ask the positive users to rate us instead. It doesn't feel black hat to me, but maybe just because we evolved to this point. I certainly do feel uncomfortable with the cynical interpretation: that we're purposefully segmenting our users to avoid bad ratings. I think what EA is doing is different from us because they're using stars, which are linked to App Store ratings for users, because it's 5 stars or nothing, and it looks more likely that they truly are trying to avoid sending detractors to rate the app. But if you squint a little, they are basically the same thing. And it isn't a pattern I want to see takeoff. So, I'm conflicted.