Awful app review trend among Turkish users

http://blog.appwared.com/awful-app-review-trend-among-turkish-users-this-is-why-your-app-gets-so-many-one-star-reviews/

by mrtksn • 13 years ago

352 197 13 years ago

blog.appwared.com

morgante2• 13 years ago

What do you expect from Android users? In general the Google Play store is a far more bizarre and spammy atmosphere...

fat0wl• 13 years ago

yah they should just work out some learning method to pick out stuff that looks odd & offer to clean it up. But i believe then it would require a thin layer of oversight and Google of course will not want to get involved. Apple clearly doesn't shy away from app store admin which is why they have the better platform at the moment.

Or they could of course just do away with the mechanism that auto-highlights 1-star reviews and instead you know.... ask the user what they want to see. As if people can't handle clicking a bar that says "Read 1 star reviews" a la Amazon.

Untit1ed• 13 years ago

I can't imagine why you would want to list 1 star reviews first... generally 1 and 5 star ones are the least informative (either "I'VE PLAYED FOR 5 MINUTES AND IT'S THE BEST GAME EVER" or "MY PHONE CRASHED WHILE DOWNLOADING THIS IT'S A VIRUS!!!", and 2-4 reflect though-out reviews.

testrun• 13 years ago

Projecting much? Most mind bogling idiotic comment ever.

mrtksn5• 13 years ago

I don't think that Android users are any worse than IOS users however I strongly believe that Google Play needs to rethink it's policies.

coolnow• 13 years ago

"What do you expect from Android users?"

Sigh. What did i expect from a web designer? /s

morgante2• 13 years ago

Sigh. What did i expect from a web designer? /s

I'm not a web designer...

corresation• 13 years ago

Clearly more than we should expect from you.

thejosh• 13 years ago

Ah yes, the great unwashed and their non Apple operating systems.

rdtsc4• 13 years ago

Oh, this is glorious!

The reason I like is because your attitude (without your realizing perhaps) also typifies Apple users' stereotype.

Trying to execute a slick low blow to Android users, you have it explode in your face, and are instead reinforcing the stereotype associated with the Apple users.

(Whether it is true or not, doesn't matter, it is funny that you are reinforcing it).

ID_HOME2• 13 years ago

TIL Android users are XXXXers

greenwalls• 13 years ago

If you aren't generating any revenue from Turkey you could block that country from your app.

jds375• 13 years ago

Is this strictly limited to Turkish users? I have a feeling that if we were to consider apps in other languages we might find it's just a general problem amongst all users.

jfoster• 13 years ago

It could just be that the trend started amongst Turkish users first and the language barrier could be inhibiting its spread to other locales. This article having translated and explained the review ranking behaviour might speed things along.

jblow• 13 years ago

This article seems naive. Probably people are being paid to rate apps down.

eridius• 13 years ago

If they're being paid to rate the app down, why does the review itself claim the game is good?

yock• 13 years ago

Plausible deniability?

katharsiss7• 13 years ago

They are not being paid :) I am Turkish, and believe me every, but every apps' review section is full of these stupid 1-star reviews. Turkish apps, english apps, popular apps with ~5 million downloads, unknown apps with ~1000 downloads.. It is mind blowing. They don't know they are hurting developers and firms. Actually some of them thinking that they are helping with their "positive comments". They are showing their appreciation with a positive comment on the front page (with the help of giving 1 star rating).

diziet2• 13 years ago

On iOS, we have indexed 666,355 reviews in Turkey. Out of those, 92,853 are 1 star reviews. 13.93%

On iOS, we have 32,296,341 reviews, with 3,448,351 being 1 star reviews. 10.67% one star reviews.

Let's see if we limit it to reviews in the last 2 months:

16.47% negative in Turkey (65,154 total reviews) 12.05% negative in the US (1,960,283 total reviews)

(source - internal https://sensortower.com analytics)

It's a bit harder to separate reviews between countries on Android, but we have 7,862,505 recent reviews indexed in the last 2 months on Android, and 780,997 of them are negative (9.93%). I will try to run a query with language detection, though that might take a bit of time~

mrtksn5• 13 years ago

Thank you, this is cool. It's very annoying to read comments like "I gave 1 star but it's a good game" however I wonder how much is the actual effect on the ratings.

smilliken• 13 years ago

I'm seeing a similar number for iOS:

    Rating         % All         % Turkish
    1              09.6%         15.2%
    2              03.5%         04.4%
    3              06.5%         07.0%
    4              16.6%         14.5%
    5              63.6%         58.7%

(Source: data from MixRank's iOS intelligence)

There's definitely a bump in 1-star reviews in Turkey.

pliny• 13 years ago

Could be accounted for by apps with poor localization.

tlarkworthy• 13 years ago

That bump may be bigger if you separate by date. If it's a new trend then the newer Turkish reviews will be the outliers.

bnegreve• 13 years ago

There's definitely a bump in 1-star reviews in Turkey.

Wait wait wait, the mere fact that Turkish has more 1 start review than the world average doesn't tell you anything about other countries individually.

It could be that most countries are above the world average except a couple of countries with almost no 0-star reviews.

If you want to make this point, at least give us the standard deviation.

darkhorn4• 13 years ago

That's why we don't have nice things in Turkey.

userbinator3• 13 years ago

666,355

For a second I misread that as 65,536 (64K) reviews.

sepeth• 13 years ago

Abusing something is like a cultural thing in here. Sorry :(

moocowduckquack• 13 years ago

Is pretty funny in a law of unintended consequences kind of a way.

bagels• 13 years ago

This makes me wonder... are there locales where 1 star might be taken to mean a better review than a 5 star review?

I realize that's not what's being claimed here, though.

There's no intrinsic meaning to how stars correlate to quality is my thinking here, but perhaps only due to familiarity do we think that more stars is better and not worse.

rdtsc4• 13 years ago

It seems at least in this case they know what they are doing because they say thing like this "Great game, but give it 1 start so people see my comment". I think they are fully aware and are even "apologizing" for it.

userbinator3• 13 years ago

Here's a comment which suggests that at least some of them are thinking 1 star is the best:

Kubilay Tekin: I hadn't gave 1 star just because I want my comment gets shown on top, I actually think that the game is aweful aqws.w.wew..ws

(I've seen this phenomenon before - there are quite a few who associate 1 with first place, hence surveys and such often have the [1 = worst, 10 = best] next to each "rate xxx on a scale of 1 to 10")

tempestn• 13 years ago

I don't think that's what that comment suggests. The commenter is acknowledging that some people give one star just to have their comment seen, even though they think it's a good app, but that he personally is giving one star because he thought it was indeed awful.

kyberias2• 13 years ago

What? No, it doesn't suggest that at all. The reviewer actually writes that he thinks it's awful and that he would have given it 1 even though he didn't want his comment to be on top.

gojomo• 13 years ago

Indeed there are many rating systems where '1' is 'best', 'first-in-rank', 'most-preferred'.

I've never seen an online 'stars' system that works that way... but it's possible in some other cultural context a single star is somehow honored more than many, and thus without explanation the star-system could be misinterpreted. (Of course the comments here strongly suggest that's not a factor in this case.)

shultays2• 13 years ago

I am from Turkey and no, 1 star is still 1 star here. It is not a cultural mistake, it is just the people in example are being narcissistic and trying to show off

wcdolphin• 13 years ago

I wonder if it is isolated to Google Play, and if so, if these are actually human accounts?

rdtsc4• 13 years ago

Interesting.

Is it for mixed reviews as in total reviews worldwide and Turkey or just for Turkey. It seems it is just for Turkey.

Maybe they are just more honest and say why they are giving 1 star reviews. Or maybe they are dishonest and really think the game is terrible but in the comment chose to say something else to seem nice? Is there somehow a disproportionate presence of Turkish Android app developers and since they are competing with you they are just messing with author's head.

Looking at the game review in the app store (presumably the US version) most 1 or 2 star reviews seem valid (and don't see a particular trend with names, to mean they are certain ethnicity).

A guess it would be good to browser other apps' reviews from Turkey. So I took a look at Cut The Rope. Very popular game, indeed.

Looking at US reviews, looks good.

Turkish:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zeptolab.c...

Hmm, well I can't read Turkish. So I opened Google Translate and started translating a few top 1 star review. And yap, same pattern.

===

Mükemmel Çok güzel harika bir oyun gözüksün diye 1

---

Excellent Very nice people to see a great game as one

===

Gerçekten cok guzel bir oyun hem zeka açıcı Gercekten cok güzel

---

Really a very nice game're really nice and intelligence opener

===

Someone might want to help, but even with Google Translate it looks like they are giving it good reviews as text but 1 star as a score.

The crude and seemingly insensitive way is to just prevent Turkish reviewers from commenting. Or even better hellban them and never account for their score. The would correct this pretty quickly I would imagine.

Now I would really hope someone from Turkey to explain if there is a cultural or social reason for this. It just seems to strange and odd.

mrtksn5• 13 years ago

Hi, I can say Google translate did good enough job.

The speculation here in Turkey is that these are just kids. I see lots of complains from Turkish users on lot's of websites. Many Turks are switching to English just to get rid of this kind of comments.

thaumasiotes2• 13 years ago

The crude and seemingly insensitive way is to just prevent Turkish reviewers from commenting. Or even better hellban them and never account for their score.

Maybe don't provide a guaranteed way to appear in the displayed comments? I'd expect this to spread outside of Turkey pretty quickly.

thaumasiotes2• 13 years ago

This could be better phrased. How about "don't require people to leave one-star reviews if they want to appear in the comments".

katharsiss7• 13 years ago

This is pretty sad for other Turkish people, who seeks proper reviews and know proper rating mentality. It is like hell for me. I translated an app to Turkish and wanted to check if there is any translation related comments. It blew my mind. There was 1 review in terms of new translation pack. The rest was 1-star reviews. I started to downvote these reviews (thumb down), but I guess no one cares enough to vote up or down useful reviews. There has to be another way. I guess voting anonymously will be the solution. Thanks to Google's Google+ integration, some stupid attention seekers want to show their full name on apps' first pages.

mcv• 13 years ago

I don't even understand why a 1 star review would automatically appear, and a 5 star review wouldn't. What possible justification is there for that?

Anyway, Google has a few ways they could fix this:

* Allow users to rate reviews. Amazon does this. Why not Google? Or maybe rate reviewers, and don't show any reviews from notorious idiots. * Interpret the text of the review and check if it matches the score. Show those reviews that sound like they have something interesting to say. If any company can implement this, it's Google. * Separate reviews by country.

sandGorgon• 13 years ago

is the Turkish language read from right to left? maybe they are counting stars from the wrong side.

tbrake• 13 years ago

No, it's read left to right.

In 1928 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk started a plan[1] to ditch the old form of written Turkish (Ottoman Turkish which was RTL[2]) and implement one based on the latin alphabet in order to fight a huge illiteracy problem at the time.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Kemal_Atat%C3%BCrk#Mode...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_alphabet

katharsiss7• 13 years ago

Let me assure you, they know that 1 star is bad, 5 star is good. Even courses are rated between 1(bad)-5(good) in school reports. They also say that "I just rated 1 star to be seen, BUT it is a wonderful app", etc. I saw some comments like this : "I say hi to my cousin, this game is so fun. But I am giving 1 star to be on top." They are trolling and do not care or do not know about total rating system.

Jun84• 13 years ago

How did you conclude that "It seems it's just for Turkey". As far as I can see the OP has not done much analysis either and based his comments on a few comments. The only significant analysis I've seen is done by diziet below.

rdtsc4• 13 years ago

What I meant was that clicking that review link shows a localized page with Turkish reviews and his US (default?) review links doesn't show that anomaly.

But, it seems the total review average and review count is an aggregate of all localized review sites. So a pathological site will affect the average rating, without non-native speakers getting to read those ridiculous reviews and decided how unhelpful they are.

Sorry it was just my talking out loud figuring out how reviews on Play store are supposed to work.

katharsiss7• 13 years ago

As a Turkish Android user (not a developer, I just helped some developers by means of graphic design and Turkish language packs) let me speak my mind.

This thing is pretty new. I can't make a proper judgement of apps because of this new meme. I want to see international or English comments, but I can't without changing my language preferences. I guess it goes like this:

These people are mostly 10-15 years old, English-illiterate teens. Since Google uses real names on comments(Google+), they want to be seen with their names. I guess they show this to their friends, family, etc.. They feel like they are contributing maybe(?!) They seek for attention (?!) Or maybe it is just for trolling...

When you use Google Play on your PC, you can click on the names of the commentators. Maybe they think that it is a some kind of communication way :S Something like "add/PM me if you like". Weird.

When I check local reddit-like website of Turkey (eksisözlük), there are many people who are annoyed by this new meme. (https://eksisozluk.com/yorumum-gozuksun-diye-1-yildiz--41109...)

To sum up, I think this is really annoying, when I check the Google+ profiles of these 1-star-commentators, I see some non-english-speaking people or attention-seeking teens.

But what about Google Play's algorithm? Does it make sense? One-line-long comments with 1 star are being seen on front page of the apps... What about 2/3/4/5 starred useful comments? Why does Google Play show only 1-starred ones? It does not make sense at all. And these teens are just exploiting this. Why does Google Play's system accept 1-star comments as more helpful than others?

JohnTHaller2• 13 years ago

Likely, it's trying to show a helpful good and a helpful bad review next to each other. Amazon, etc all do this as well. I guess they haven't had as many issues with people exploiting it because you can rate reviews as helpful or not. Google should introduce a helpful or not helpful up/down rating for reviews which should solve this problem. Or a "This user is an idiot" button that, if enough people click, the review is thrown out. And, if enough people click it on multiple apps for the same user's reviews, they are banned from reviewing.

Crito3• 13 years ago

If you are going to take user reviews seriously, you have to account for the possibility that a significant portion of the general population may be comprised of idiots.

People misusing the star system is a problem, but the real problem is that we are forced to care when people misuse it.

(To correct this specific problem, I would recommend low-tolerance hellbanning. If a positive review is accompanied by a one-star rating, that user's ratings and comments will never be seen by another user again.)

robertjwebb• 13 years ago

Are developers on the play store allowed to delete reviews? That sounds like something that would be really easily abused (i.e. delete all bad reviews of your bad product).

jheriko• 13 years ago

There is no option on the developer console for this afaik. If there is it is not prominent or easily discovered.

However, I saw a small burst of bad reviews on an app I used to work on a few months back - all of those reviews including the developer replies are now 'missing'.

Its possible they merely flagged the reviews and Google got rid of them because they were rude. Possibly the OPs removed them because the developer got in contact to ease their pain somehow...

Avalaxy• 13 years ago

When I read the title I thought: "well, must be an issue with internationalization (see Turkey test)". When I read the actual article I just thought "w..t..f... This just doesn't make any sense, who came up with this?".

coralreef• 13 years ago

As an iOS dev, you get a lot of crappy reviews based on really dumb, inane things by users.

People are very quick to give 1-star reviews without hesitation.

jeffehobbs• 13 years ago

That's nobody's business but the Turks.

newyankee• 13 years ago

This reminds me of the case where an Indian politician's facebook page was found to contain a lot of 'likes' from Turkish users.

http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/rajasthan-chief-minister-a...

The city where he was most liked changed from Jaipur to Istanbul which helped detect this.

sprite• 13 years ago

I hate the iOS review system. People rarely leave a review if the like the app, but as soon as they have something to complain about they will leave a bad review. Also most people if they have an issue will automatically leave a bad review instead of contacting the support email to get it resolved.

What's even more annoying is people that write things like 'Best app ever' and then give it a 3 or 4 star rating instead of 5.

cclogg• 13 years ago

Oh man this post is spot on LOL.

Man, with PC games you have forums so that's great for communicating, but with mobile it seems like there's generally a disconnect between developer and player. The system, while great to have, doesn't really encourage it.

username223• 13 years ago

Fortunately, developers have figured out an even more hateful response:

http://effyr.tumblr.com/

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

Also most people if they have an issue will automatically leave a bad review instead of contacting the support email to get it resolved.

because most people are used to working with big products. Even me, a developer, this is the first time I considered that you could in general email support and not get some patronizing useless robot. It makes sense now that I think about it, since so many of the apps are made by small sized development firms or even just lone wolfs, there's a good chance I could get a human, maybe even another dev!

In general, that would never happen with a large and well known product. Faced with that, people take the only outlet they feel with maybe change something.

The best app ever part. Well...

People always exaggerate, ALWAYS.

gfodor2• 13 years ago

As a developer you can combat both of these dynamics.

Make sure you provide a clear way for them to contact you if they are running into trouble.

Reach out to your engaged users and pro-actively ask them to review the app after you're confident they have had a good experience.

TylerE• 13 years ago

As a consumer, I find (honest) bad reviews far more useful than (even) honest good reviews.

lostlogin• 13 years ago

I barely ever see reviews and have to ask to see reviews for other version. I'm in New Zealand. Its a disincentive to updating an app as far as I can tell. If something works and isn't broken, minor updates will lose the developer prominent reviews. Or am I missing something?

mwfunk• 13 years ago

I think you'll see the same pattern all over the Internet, whether it's app stores or forums. People have to go out of their way to post something, and human nature is such that they're much more likely to expend that effort to post a negative opinion on something than a positive opinion.

I wonder if at least some of the motivation for "Please rate us!" popups in mobile apps isn't just to get more ratings, but also to get a more representative (i.e., more positive) sampling of user opinions as well.

cLeEOGPw• 13 years ago

They are just exploiting the flawed rating system. If users are encouraged by the system to give bad reviews I don't feel that they could be blamed. Google should think of other way to display review comments.

fzltrp2• 13 years ago

They could perhaps implement meta reviews, which let users rate reviews. Note That:

* perhaps the ratio of misleading ratings isn't necessarily high enough to render the system ineffective (iow, it may be just noise), but in order to know that, it appears to me that the meta review would be necessary.

* it wouldn't stop people from trying to game the system (which lead to the idea that even if meta review was there, its effectiveness would have to be tested, maybe by using... a meta meta review?)

clarky072• 13 years ago

Apple has done this for years. "is this comment helpful" and then the reviews can be sorted by most helpful in addition to recent. i'm pretty sure most helpful is the default as well.

hrasyid• 13 years ago

Interesting. Any idea for another way "helpful comments" can be identified? I mean, presenting bad reviews is helpful in most cases.

aestra• 13 years ago

People's review habits in general are bizarre. I have read reviews like "I haven't gotten a chance to use the product yet" with a 3 star rating. One wonders what exactly they are reviewing. Or recipe reviews are the weirdest, every one of them say "I change blah blah blah" to the point where its a completely different recipe then they review their recipe, like that's somehow appropriate. I can understand making one tweek to suit your taste but don't change the whole recipe and think thats what you are reviewing.

SomeCallMeTim2• 13 years ago

When I FIRST released a paid game on the Android Market, after my first dozen 5-star reviews I was devastated by a 1-star review, the content of which was "I can't review this game in only 15 minutes."

And that user then promptly refunded the game within the (then-new) 15 minute window.

And (surprise!) someone ended up uploading a "cracked" [1] version of my game to warez sites shortly thereafter. Talk about adding insult to injury.

[1] I used a sneaky way to detect "cracks" in my game that involved, in part, letting the hacker think they'd cracked it: The game would query Google to see if they'd paid for it, and if not, it would throw a "Sorry, you don't own this game" dialog up. There were scripts around that would remove the standard Google DRM, though; instead of fighting that, I LET them "hack" it, and afterwards it wouldn't bring up that dialog any more. But then the behavior reverted to being identical to the free demo (first 30 levels free, then you had to buy the real game). It was "hacked" almost a dozen times, and never once did anyone figure out how to get past the second layer of protection.

TillE• 13 years ago

How did you detect that the DRM check was removed?

avighnay2• 13 years ago

Ha ha! It gave me a good laugh :-)

avighnay2• 13 years ago

oops sorry, I thought it was funny that people can be so eager to have their comments appear but I missed the seriousness

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

The sad fact is that most people are awful. I fully expect this trend to catch on elsewhere, it just happens to have got started off in Turkey.

jnbiche3• 13 years ago

This is really odd, particularly considering that Turkey is by far one of the friendliest places I've been in my many travels (well, at least many travels when I was younger).

I question whether they're aware of the grief that their reviews are causing. In any case, it's still pretty inconsiderate to tell someone (numerically) that you think their work sucks, even if you don't really mean any harm.

All in all, probably an extension of the whole "cursing/attacking/belittling someone on the Internet doesn't count" phenomenon.

katharsiss7• 13 years ago

They don't think that they are hurting developers, firms, etc. I saw a comment like this: "Hey dude, don't get me wrong I loved your app, it is really fun thank you; but I am giving 1-star just to be seen".

I guess they don't comprehend stars' purpose. When they are searching apps, they just scroll down to the comments. Stars are not a way to judge the apps. Also, with the Google+ integration, they enjoy their full name is being seen on an app's page. Weird.

eru3• 13 years ago

Turks are friendly in person, and warm and welcoming. But in general, they don't seem to have as much of a general concept of civic duty. Eg they just litter, because there's no visible victim, and they don't see the guy who has to pick up the trash.

(I lived there for a few months.)

jrockway• 13 years ago

To be fair, I'm not sure it has ever been a good idea to take advice from random strangers on the Internet.

shiven• 13 years ago

Not sure that still applies as aptly in the emerging world where (nearly) everything is being advertised, explored, researched and ordered online.

Good or bad, the crowd is relying on its emerging "wisdom" more 'n more.

xcyu• 13 years ago

Maybe Google should do sentiment analysis on review text and compare with star rating then rank the review to be less visible if the two contradicts too much?

picardo• 13 years ago

Turkish users want their reviews to be seen. This sounds narcissistic to us, but for a lot of people being asked for their opinion of a product is a big deal. Rather than condemning the users, we should look for ways to improve the UX of the Google Play Store.

There could be cultural factors at play here as well. When I was growing up in Turkey, every so often there would be a fad that picked obscure artefacts of American culture and turned them into articles of social prestige. Cheesy American soap operas, songs and actors would suddenly and inexplicably become national sensations that everyone had to know. I assume something similar is going on with the Android Play Store reviews. Having your review on the frontpage of an app had become a point of pride, so much so that users are subverting the system to get there.

ezrameanshelp• 13 years ago

What's interesting is that Google Play will already automatically surface the reviews from anyone in your extended circles.

mkramlich• 13 years ago

I once did iPhone app development. I'll always remember one app in particular that I shipped. A retro game. We'd see lots of "reviews" in the App Store where the user would leave comments like, "great game! loved it. but I really wished there were more playable levels for the 99 cents I paid. So I could only give it 1 out of 5 stars."

ad nauseum

ben1040• 13 years ago

I've seen plenty of reviews along the lines of "This free app does everything it says it does, and does it extremely well. But it doesn't do <unfeasible thing that would matter only in some obscure use case> so until it does, 1 star."

dkural• 13 years ago

I am Turkish, I live in the US and run a startup. I conducted a small experiment (n=3) among my cousins living in Turkey aged 8-14: They don't understand that 3rd parties make these apps not tied to the device; and they definitely don't understand that the rating (in general) would impact someone making this app financially. Huh.

icambron• 13 years ago

Why do you think this is more prevalent in Turkey than in other countries? Is there something unique about Turkish culture that would cause this misunderstanding or misprioritization?

Crito3• 13 years ago

I suspect the misconceptions are wider spread than Turkey, though the meme of giving one star reviews to be "at the top" has yet to spread.

Hopefully this article, and others like it, do not give the meme a bump up across the language barrier.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

> "Why do you think this is more prevalent in Turkey than in other countries?"

If you're referencing the fact that they don't understand the apps are made by third parties it isn't limited to turkey. I'm an iOS developer and the number of people that think I 'work for Apple' is incredible.

jonny_eh• 13 years ago

Just to be clear, are you saying that they think Google makes all the apps in Google Play?

eclipxe• 13 years ago

Sadly, I've heard that many non-tech-savvy people in the US believe Apple makes all the apps in the AppStore. "Oh you make iPhone apps? How do you like working at Apple?!!"

Jun84• 13 years ago

I don't think this phenomenon has much to do with user misconceptions, it's more of a meme that has spread to many Turkish users, e.g. do a search on "gozuksun diye 1 yildiz verdim" (gave 1 star so my comment is seen) or the eksisozluk link in my comment below.

gkya2• 13 years ago

So you say that you asked a bunch of questions to a couple kids and concluded that the whole population of Turkey are idiots? Let me tell you, your cousin's reactions are quite expected, but I doubt yours are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

berkay• 13 years ago

He simply provided a data point, mentioned the sample size, and indicated their responses surprised him. There is no generalization, nothing indicating the conclusion of the sorts you mention. I'm baffled by your interpretation of his comment. "concluded that the whole population of Turkey are idiots?" What makes you think that?

roel_v• 13 years ago

" your cousin's reactions are quite expected,"

Why?

Gigablah• 13 years ago

Before you get all uppity about the scientific method, I suggest you read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_to_conclusions

gfodor2• 13 years ago

It's kind of weird that they want their comment to be at the top, but the only thing they say in their comment is that they want it to be at the top. You'd think if they were looking for exposure, they'd use the exposure to do something other than talking about how they wanted exposure.

baddox2• 13 years ago

First.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Priceless.

derefr• 13 years ago

I think the First Post meme has a bit of orthogonal justification to it, though: that if you spend the time to write something other than "first post," someone else will have beaten you to posting by writing less.

smoyer2• 13 years ago

I didn't even know that was ALLOWED on Hacker News! All this time I've been going back to SlashDot when I needed to post that, and I could have been claiming first posts here.

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

You got it. My mother made $27,177 last month just sitting at home answering the phone.

mrtksn5• 13 years ago

Haha, funny thing: I've seen comments greetings their loved ones. Like it's on TV and their relatives are watching it :)

zem• 13 years ago

you've clearly never used slashdot (:

ID_HOME2• 13 years ago

Are you joking or are you really this naive?

AJ007• 13 years ago

This seems like a great channel for spammers, but I suppose Apple/Google would permanently ban the user's account quickly.

In a mass used platform a single user should never be able to receive 100% visibility by a simple action.

kyberias2• 13 years ago

There's also a phenomenon in IMDB where Turkish movies get voted exceptionally high on many categories.

fsniper• 13 years ago

Turkish users like to manipulate votes and have some high self esteem to be a superior in doing anything. So if some thing is Turkish rooted and be or seems to be better than competitors they have pride. So to have more pride and fulfil their self esteem they try to manipulate every voting system.

In this case, the self esteem is their comment is better to bee seen then anyone else's so why not manipulate the system? It's some kind of hacking culture but in a bad motive.

Jun84• 13 years ago

Maybe it's a Saturday night thing but the discussion for this part mostly has comments that rival the ignorance of the OP, e.g. "The sad fact is that most people are awful", "you could block that country from your app", all based on simplistic anecdotal analysis given in the post.

Before you arrive at such a sweeping conclusion, you should perform at least a little bit of statistical testing, e.g. see diziet's analysis on this page.

Two further comments:

1. The behavior mentioned in the post does seem to be a real thing, as evidenced by the many entries in the Turkish zeitgeist site eksisozluk: https://eksisozluk.com/yorumum-gozuksun-diye-1-yildiz--41109..., the first entry under this heading is dated 11/13/2013 so it seems to be a new meme. Also, the entries suggest that the behavior seems to be focused on Google Play rather than the Apple Store.

2. This shows a significant drawback of Google Play's selection of comments to display. Looking at the selected comments for the same game on the Apple Store (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wheres-my-water-2/id63885314...) I don't see this kind of 1 star ratings.

clarky072• 13 years ago

You wouldn't see these ratings on the Apple Store unless you are in Turkey (or changed your device's region) because Apple separates app store ratings. US devices only see US ratings. Turkey only sees Turkey ratings.

EDIT: Also, Apple doesn't display ratings like Google does, so there is clearly no reason for them to leave reviews like that.

wyager2• 13 years ago

That's clever. It accounts for cultural differences in rating systems.

A 3/5 isn't a good rating in any country I've lived. A 5 is good. There isn't really a rating for "exceptionally amazing". But I'm sure somewhere, a 3/5 means "pretty good" and 5/5 is reserved for exceptionally positive reviews.

Jun84• 13 years ago

You're right. Here's the link to the game on Turkish Store: https://itunes.apple.com/tr/app/wheres-my-water-2/id63885314...

mrtksn5• 13 years ago

Hi, I am aware that the post on my blog is pretty shallow but my intention was not to dive deeper into the problem anyway.

As you confirmed, the phenomenon is real. I am an IOS user and I was shocked when a friend told me about the comments people are making at Google Play, so I quickly put together a blog and wrote a post that dramatically exposes the problem. The idea is to catch attention of the people so that those who have the necessary tools and time can investigate it thoroughly.

The problem is real and hopefully somebody in the position to fix it would see the post.

diziet2• 13 years ago

Sample size for Where's My Water is pretty small, though. 6 reviews in the last 90 days in the Turkish Store ( https://sensortower.com/ios/us/disney/app/wheres-my-water-2/... )

Compared to the US, which received a lot of negative reviews (https://sensortower.com/ios/us/disney/app/wheres-my-water-2/...) and has a larger sample size. It could be a much more recent behavior.

zrgiu_• 13 years ago

We had the same problem, but with Russia. Ours being a paid app and our reviews being in the low 1000s, every 1-star rating was hurting us badly, so we removed Russia completely from our distribution. We added it back a month later and things went back to normal, but that's definitely something that we shouldn't need to have done.

jnbiche3• 13 years ago

Was it the same "awesome app but 1 star so I'm on the front page?". Or just widespread 1 star reviews solely from Russia?

shimfish• 13 years ago

Do 1 star comments really go to the top or is the problem here that these kids think they do? Isn't it more likely it's just the most recent reviews that are getting shown first?

causeisunknown• 13 years ago

1-star comments really go to the top...

algomir• 13 years ago

hi i am from turkey and i can say do not take seriously turkish reviews with 1 star. these are absolutely rubbish. some people in turkey just want other people to read their comments in anyway

i am also an android developer and i do not know why they are doing this shit.

IGNORE THEM.

rytis• 13 years ago

Is there anyone else who thinks the "5 star" rating is somewhat flawed, or is it just me?

I think, the problem is that the scale is all on the positive side, but people are trying to use it to give negative rating. So naturally they readjust the scale, so that it has both, positive and negative sides, by "shifting" the zero of the scale. Now, where exactly does it go? Will 3 become 0, or is it 2 for some people, or maybe 4?

I know it's way too late in the game, but why can't the rating system be just a simple "good", "bad", "it's ok", or maybe even: :-(, :-|, :-)

Crito3• 13 years ago

I am not enamoured with the "5 star" system, but I have to say that I like it more than the standard 5-choice system that explicitly labels the choices as positive or negative: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, No Opinion, Agree, Strongly Agree

I despise that sort of system. None of the choices ever seem to be appropriate for what I think or feel.

Star systems avoid inspiring this frustration in me by giving me the freedom to imagine labels that I think fit how I feel or think.

jnbiche3• 13 years ago

Star systems avoid inspiring this frustration in me by giving me the freedom to imagine labels that I think fit how I feel or think.

And in statistical circles, this is called survey bias (rating bias).

If you think a 4 is "awesome", and another person thinks that it means "pretty good", and this effect is widespread, it will result in a biased survey that is difficult to interpret.

dsego• 13 years ago

Croatian school system uses grades 1 to 5. 1 is fail, 2 is pass, 3 is good, 4 is very good and 5 is excellent. Teachers sometime also add a minus or plus in front of the grade, e.g. -5 is almost excellent and 4+ is a bit better than very good.

renata• 13 years ago

When Netflix had their contest to improve recommendations, one of the common first-pass techniques on the forums was to zero-adjust the ratings for each user. It's hard to imagine that a big-data company of Google's size couldn't do this already, although who knows if they are.

shawabawa3• 13 years ago

Whatever netflix did it doesn't seem to have worked.

I noticed a while ago that literally 100% of netflix content (based on around ~50 things I checked on) has between 3 and 4 stars.

This makes ratings completely useless.

chmike• 13 years ago

I guess people should be able to rate comments. They would fight on comment rating and less on app rating. If the idiots are just a minority, this should fix it.

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

this is simply the first shot in our generations new problem - how to gather review globally in a useful and fair manner.

"stars ratings" is simple - and in fact too simple. Rating based on likes of friends is the next (current?) evolution - but that has some terrible drawbacks for fairness and socially beneficial ends, after that? Probably based on actual usage, as most social sciences have given up on self-reporting as a methodology and started using observations.

But it's going to be a hard slog - and personally a slog I would prefer to be done openly and not behind closed commercial doors

_random_2• 13 years ago

Better than "I would give it 5 stars if it was free" type of comments.

criswell• 13 years ago

"I would rate these jeans 5 stars, but they were delivered a day late so I'm giving them 1 star."

_s• 13 years ago

Mere speculation: Isn't this just a result of the mixing of "Helpfulness" feature and the black-hat marketing / reviews purchasing?

As in now those selling "Reviews" for your app; something like $100 for around fifty 3 to 5 star reviews can justify their price by stating their reviewers have consistently ranked as being "Helpful" and always on the "front page" of any app review? And what we're seeing is the reviewers working for these black-hat intermediaries trying to up their overall review "weight"; whereby I'm assuming google takes into account your previous reviews (and their helpfulness) with how long your review now stays on the front page (much like comments staying on top of a HN thread).

Or it could just be a typical fad akin to wanting the personalized car registration of "A1", being top/first etc.

rwallace• 13 years ago

WTF? Why is this bug report getting spammed with talk about Turkey? The bug is that the system displays one star reviews first, creating broken incentives. Assuming that the code works (i.e., doesn't work) the same way in every country, the country has nothing to do with it. The system needs to be fixed to use a more neutral display order.

kingkawn• 13 years ago

In America either something changes our lives or we want the creator to have their house taken away.

ipityonme• 13 years ago

They are mostly 9-14 years old kids. And yes, they are selfish, spoiled, senseless a bunch stupids. Do not think i am using "a bunch" phrase to de-emphasize this situation. There are 6.5 million 9-14 years old kids live in Turkey and i can guarantee that, half of them can do this shit. So google must do something before developers get more damage from this stupidity.

Mindless2112• 13 years ago

YouTube already realized that the 5-star rating system doesn't work [1]. Based on the histograms I see on the Play Store, it's seems like they should realize it too.

[1] http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-domina...

darkhorn4• 13 years ago

Another awful app review trend among Turkish users https://itunes.apple.com/tr/app/cloudsearch-reverse-phone/id... They give 5 star in order to get 3 free credits. (Also this app uses CIA app's database which is free)

darkhorn4• 13 years ago

Also the term "yorum" in Turkish means "comment". So it does not completely mean "review". In other words, there is no equivalent translation for the word "review".

katharsiss7• 13 years ago

"inceleme" may cover "review". it is used to be like this in turkish websites:

"Galaxy S3 incelemesi" "Samsung SyncMaster 2333 incelemesi"... etc.

Turkish users are used to the word "inceleme". Yorum/comment is like: ah yes I liked, fuck this sucks. A yorum/comment may not include why do you like it/why does it suck, etc.

darkhorn4• 13 years ago

Turkish users "crack" reCaptcha http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/01/comments-back-on-recaptcha-...

f4stjack• 13 years ago

And does this surprise you, op? I think you have seen ample evidence of so called "troll" comments garner more attention and clicks in ekşisözlük. They are doing this, because they want attention and google provides an easy way to do it. You don't even have to write a provocative content, just click 1 star and you are on the top of the world.

A community, be it a virtual or a real one, has its trolls, e.g. misusers. If you promote such a behavior, albeit unintentionally, increase in repetition of such behavior is very expectable. The thing to do in my humble opinion is rethinking this feedback mechanism and rebuild it in the content quality's favor.

pacala• 13 years ago

http://nlp.stanford.edu/sentiment/

Good, a very good game! I gave 1 star so that my comment gets seen.

++ very positive

The game is an example of how a good game should be! Don't bother that I gave 1 star, it's because I want my comment gets seen.

++ very positive

Super! I gave 1 star so that my comment is shown first but I actually liked the game.

0 neutral

I hadn't gave 1 star just because I want my comment gets shown on top, I actually think that the game is aweful aqws.w.wew..ws

- negative

andrewflnr• 13 years ago

Maybe star ratings should be removed in favor of text reviews with "ratings" based exclusively on sentiment analysis. Has machine learning reached a state where that's practical? If not, will anyone hazard a guess on when it will?

eru3• 13 years ago

Just offer both, and weigh them behind the scenes however you feel like.

sandeshd• 13 years ago

I guess Turkish users will get blocked by app developers after looking at this ridiculous attitude. Btw they helped Google to find this bug, good job Turkish users.

shultays2• 13 years ago

It is not really a bug, 1 star reviews get an intentional bump in priority which is expected since "THIS APP BROKE MY PHONE, 1 STAR" is more important than "Just another breakout clone, meh. 3 star"

minusSeven• 13 years ago

This is like : http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-04-16/

robmcm• 13 years ago

Perhaps you should only be allowed to give an app a 1 star review if you delete it.

Re-installing it should remove your review.

whizzkid• 13 years ago

As a Turkish, I think i know little better what is going on here;

It is the high school kids that they think it is cool to mess up with big and serious systems in their stupid way. It is fun for them to mess up rules which I think is the same for most of the teenagers around the world. They try to break things, don't listen teachers, don't go to school.

They think that they should be doing what they want instead of what others want them to do.

The outcome for the turkish teenagers irritating behaviour showed in Google's Play Store. That is all what i can see.

Aren't we all tired of these kids actions around us sometimes? :)

Awful app review trend among Turkish users

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