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Blackberry BBM App and Suspicious Google Play Ratings
sl4shd0rk writes "In what could be an act of desparation of a company in it's death throes, Blackberry has submitted their BBM messaging application to Google Play for download. While this may seem like a logical path for a company on life-support, what wasn't expected is the sheer number of identical 5-star reviews the application has received since being posted. In what appears to be review 'ballot stuffing,' it poses the questions of just how Google is going to handle the subject of manufactured reviews as well as how many other entities have engaged in the same behavior. The same problems have plagued Amazon's review system as well bringing into question the validity of 'crowd based review' and whether it's possible to legitimize this type of system." The linked article points out that the suspicious posts may be the result of ballot stuffing intended to hype one of the unofficial Blackberry apps, rather than RIM's own.
In this situation stuffing the ballot box probably won't matter.
Thank you so much blackberry team. I was waiting this app. Its really great user friendly and smooth.
(I'll wait patiently for my check now)
Maybe they just made a good app that people like?
There are plenty of BlackBerry fanboys around, especially here in Canada. I believe it's far more likely that some idiot script-kiddie fanboys are behind this than actually BlackBerry employees... Or, if it IS BlackBerry employees, it's people acting alone who are afraid for their careers.
They're stupid either way, because of course it just makes BlackBerry look ridiculous (not that they need any more help with that nowadays).
Thank you so much blackberry team. I was waiting this app. Its really great user friendly and smooth.
If you happen to look at the reviews for Kik, you'll discover that apparently the app gets five starts, is 15 years old, male, in California, and looking for nice girls who like to have a good time. Or at least it is on the days that it isn't describing how it has a BBC. I always wondered how it was that so many British Broadcasting Corporation shareholders were using that app...maybe that's what BlackBerry needs: more BBC?
But... I was waiting for this app. Its really great user friendly and smooth. :)
RIM is indeed dead because they don't exist anymore after they changed their name.
Reminds me of the negative review wars, too. Antivirus reviews frequently exclaim it installs virus, even of legitimate products.
This on top of normal reviews where people are more likely to go bitch over minor problems than praise -- the one in a thousand guy wins.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I am shocked! Nothing like this has ever happened on the Internet before.
FTFY.
Crowd-sourced reviews suffer from at least the following issues:
- reviews by people who have no business reviewing (Amazon.com)
- reviews only by people who feel strongly about it (Amazon.com, app stores)
- aggregate ratings based on averages, not presented as histograms (amazon.com and app stores have started adding this in the "details", but it's still gameable)
- changes to reviews over time are not obvious
I'd like to share how, despite its many problems, Bricklink does a fairly good job on this particular topic. As a buyer or a seller, you are heavily encouraged (it's part of the workflow) to rate every single transaction. There are no reviews that are not based on experience, and each experience is rated only once. While a total count of reviews is shown, there's no other aggregate value shown that could be misleading -- by the time you see the reviews, they're already broken into a simple histogram (good, bad, neutral) for comparison. They also do a sort of log(t) rating system on the reviews: they're broken up into current-month, current-year, and all previous years combined. So you can tell if things have recently taken a turn for the worse, or someone's tried to fix an image problem by actually improving. History is not lost, but for a potential buyer, recent history is highlighted.
I'd like for reviews (Bricklink, Amazon, etc.) to be broken up into aspects -- the product itself, customer service, shipping, etc. But I recognize that by asking more questions, you raise the barrier to entry, and you'll get less (and much more biased) data. I see far too many 1-star reviews on Amazon not as a result of the product itself, but of the shipping or customer service.
I kind of feel sorry for app developers who embed a "rate my app" feature directly in the app. It feels gimmicky, it feels like they're trolling for 5-star reviews, and yet it kind of makes sense -- try to hit up every user with the question, even if they wouldn't have naturally thought to bother, and do so after they've started using the app, so you get a fairer opinion. But mixed with in-store reviews, and the ugliness of "rate me 5 stars, get bonus stuff for free" offers... ugh.
Reviews on these sites can be mitigated by requiring that the person purchased the item and wait a week before they can make the review on the site they are posting the review. It won't stop it entirely, but it sure would slow it down, especially in the beginning when it is a new product as they wouldn't be able to start launch day with 50-100 reviews (especially on physical goods that have not even shipped yet). Only verified owners would be able to review it. Digital items are a little more tricky, but still the 1 week wait would force people to spend a little more time with it before making a snap review...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Back in 2011, I wrote a paper, "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" There, I described the social spam ecosystem, from the SEO firms to the phony account generators to the proxy sellers. I named some of the big social spammers.
Most of the same companies are still social spamming. In the paper, I mentioned "Google Plus1 Supply". They're still active. They're still selling "+1"s. Their site looks almost exactly the same as in 2011. But their prices have gone down, and their number of fake "+1"s sold has increased from 4 million to 33 million. BuyPlus1Fans.com is still up.
Where do they get the accounts? BulkAccounts.com is still up, just like they were two years ago. They're an outsourcing firm, using low wage labor to create new accounts. For an automated approach, there's JetBots, which claims to be able to create 250,000 new accounts per day on a fast connection. They offer "CAPTCHA Bypasser", which runs CAPTCHA's through OCR, and when that doesn't work, ships them to an outsourcing firm for manual recognition. Once the account is established, their "voter bots" add any desired number of stars to reviewed items.
Facebook is no better. BulkLikes.com is still up. In 2011, they charged $260 for 500 Facebook fans. Now, it's only $70 for 1000 fans.
Old-style link spamming was expensive - spammers had to set up content farms, run servers, refresh them with interesting content, and worry about their farm being blacklisted. Social spamming is cheap - Google, Facebook, and Yelp host the spam for free. Yelp tries to push back against social spam; they've sued some spammers. But Google and Facebook don't seem to be trying at all. The fact that the big spammers of two years ago are still big spammers clearly show this.
I am the first one to hate social networks for their privacy concerns. But what we actually need is social scoring for app reviews and all. You could build a recommendation based on the friendship relationships. Since I am not going to be friend with "spamer1234", the impact of their score whould be very low. Of course, you need something more than just take the average of your friends. You need something closer to "personalized page rank" or a graph based inference system. But anything in that matter would essentially solve the spamer problems.
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