They're also definitely doing some sort of keyword manipulation, cause the official Reddit App is fairly high in the result list when searching for Lemmy.
On another note: hi, I just came here today after RIF stopped working 👋
They're also definitely doing some sort of keyword manipulation, cause the official Reddit App is fairly high in the result list when searching for Lemmy.
In the organic results or the paid results? It's pretty common for competitors to buy your name in search term sales.
One bot's review is referring to Reddit as Tripomate. Lol oh reddit...
Lol that's hilarious!
After seeing this, I thought I'd go over to the Play Store to leave a 1 star review. Then discovered I had already left a 1 star review (complaining about their shitty interface) a few months ago, which I'd totally forgotten about ;-)
I did exactly the same.
Went in with a "fuck spez" attitude and turns out I'd already had a fuck spez moment when I picked up sync after finding the Reddit app garbage.
I never managed to get it to load anything on my 380mbps internet connection. Every 3rd party app (and the website) loaded fine.
That was exactly what I did too
"Oh...I already gave it 1 star...good"
Past-self high-five.
(my first lemmy comment let's gooo)
I feel like I must be crazy but these reviews do not read like 5 star reviews. Seems super suspect.
You’re right. One specifically mentions ‘would rate this 0 if I could’ so in lieu of that option, they selected a…5?
Have they gone through and scraped the text from a bunch of real reviews and are reposting them with 5 star ratings to make them look organic?
That honestly sounds to be the likely scenario. If someone saw the review they might shrug it off as an error or mistake.
We should report them as fake. Not sure how many reports it takes to get someone to look at it but it might be worth a shot.
Imagine if Reddit, after cutting off so many 3rd party apps got their own app banned. Even if only temporarily.
Delicious
I wouldn't be surprised, the reddit "leadership" has shown it's either their way or the highway even if their way leads to a cliff.
I just came to that
People must be doing that, I scrolled for a bit and didn't see a single 5 star review. The best part is most reviews call out exactly the same problems as my 1 star review from 2018. Very few even seem to mention the API or 3rd party apps. What have they been doing for 5 years?
Pushing awards and micro transactions for Snoos and not making a functional app with sleek and in line advertising placement
I reported some of the ones I saw on the App Store but I doubt it will do much good.
Reddit is completely astroturfed now. Nothing but bots and humans that act like bots.
it's not just that reddit turned into a huge greedy corpo-clusterfuck when they went public, it was kinda bad before that too and held bad practices. Lemmy has a lot of the same features that made reddit shit on a fundamental level.
The up-vote downvote system itself is a both a curse and blessing. it's sorts things decently but it encourages mediocrity and bot like behaviour in people, if one likes to put it that way. It makes discussing anything controversial and where the issue isn't black or white, impossible. Good for cat pics and tits, but really bad for politics and the like, because everything eventually floats towards some status quo and everybody and everything else is sidelined and encouraged to shut up or go with the flow or face downvote barrage.
Also the bots are here, not yet, but they will be. Bots are easy to make here too. If this place ever gets even decently popular this place will get astroturfed and up-vote manipulated just like reddit. it's too easy to manipulated community opinion or shill for issues or things in site like this. Federated structure might help or make it worse.
They're not even public yet lmao. And reddit got started by using bots to post content from RSS feeds to make it look busier than it was.
what i fear is that reddit will take completely unnecessary but effective potshots at the fediverse and take down instances or fill them with bots just to punish those who made a point of leaving.
This is the future of corporate internet.
Lmao I saw a 5 star review that said the official app was "better than any 3rd party app", that it had "non-intrusive ads", and asking for an ads toggle for premium users to be able to support reddit. I can't even tell if it's some sort of elaborate sarcasm. Wild.
Wow, they're really spezzing it up!
Currently 2.4/5.0 on the Play Store. Wasn't that long ago when it was around 4.0. Their rating has taken a beating over the last few weeks.
Before the API pricing change, the Reddit app could be considered an internal hobby project made by a handful of employees on their spare time.
Now that this one is mandatory, it can be rated for what it is.
That's how you know that they know that the vocal minority might become a vocal majority.
Can't say I'm even remotely surprised. It's unfortunate that even user reviews have become all but useless on most platforms due to corpo bullshit like this.
just left a 1 star review, because it honestly deserves it
Isn't buying reviews/fake users something a struggling new startup does, not something that has been around for > 10 years. This is kinda sad (if indeed these are bought reviews).
Is this screenshot from Apple or Google stores (I don't know what either look like to be honest). I wonder if the same thing is happening on the other store now too.
Older than that, my account is 16 years old…I came from the Digg exodus and it existed for a short while before that.
Ironic that the FTC is going to likely make these illegal soon. Anyone want to save screenshots?
They also blocked rating the app on mobile, I had to go online and rate it via google's site, and im not sure it actually stuck.
Done my part too, hope they get review bombed 💣
I just gave them a 1. Doing my part.
I was seeing this today too! I’m reporting all those comments to the App Store, I hope it does something
Just left a 1 star review and reported a bunch of their obviously fake 5 star reviews
How lame.
Anything to boost that IPO huh.
Not even surprised at this point
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
