Spotify: 11 million downloads, 100k ratings (and another bug in the review process)

Sorry to revisit a locked topic, but I wanted to give a real example of where showing ratings with no reviews really hurts the user, and also raise a bug that may not have been mentioned before.

Spotify has 11 million downloads, 100k ratings and an average rating of 4.7.

Just casually scrolling through the ratings and reviews (with the default sort order of Newest first), I see about 9 ratings with no review for every review that simply says "Comments optional" (in one language or another.) I'm guessing the "comments optional" text is probably a bug in one of the platforms used to submit the review. (It looks like a placeholder that should be displayed to the user, but not submitted as part of the form.)

I scrolled for a few minutes and didn't find a single review with actual, substantive text. Just ratings with no reviews and ratings with "Comments optional" as the review text.

However, if I sort by Rating - Low to High, then maybe 30% to 40% of the reviews have actual text (other than "Comments Optional"). This goes back to my point about how people are much more likely to leave a text review if they have something negative to say, and negative reviews provide important information about the app to would-be users. However, it would still be a lot more useful if the empty reviews and "Comments Optional" reviews were filtered out.

So yes, obviously we know that Garmin is looking into restoring the old functionality which hides rating with no reviews. I think Garmin should also hide reviews which only consist of "Comments optional' (in any language) and update whichever one of the platforms is responsible for this glitch.

I still think Garmin should publish the absolute or relative numbers of starred ratings (i.e. number of 1-star ratings, 2-star ratings, ..., 5-star ratings), so users can use an abnormally large number of 1-star ratings as a sign that the app might have a real issue.

(I'm also aware that there are brands like adidas or underarmour which require you to leave a text review in order to rate a product online. So perhaps there is an argument for making text reviews mandatory when leaving a rating. However, one could argue it's a different situation for clothes and sporting goods vs digital apps.)

apps.garmin.com/.../30c6c876-ba43-4cbb-b4c7-03583a7cb66b

Tim 4 months ago

I agree with FlowState, especially the filter - so users can see (and maybe view) the 1 stars only, and make a true judgement for themselves - i.e are the 1 stars genuine concerns, have they been addressed by the developer, or are they just lazy users who haven't read the description / have downloaded a pick up truck but want a 2 seater sports car etc..

I also wonder how many of the "bug" related reviews that have "comments optional" are actually bot generated and this isn't a bug on the Garmin platform but how the bot works??? (yes I know that in theory to leave a review you must have downloaded it).

I think that the first comment by 1208289 proves a point as it is a spam response, and not related

EDIT: was typing this response at the same time as flowstate, so it looks a bit disjointed :-)

FlowState 4 months ago in reply to Tim

That’s an interesting theory about bot reviews. To spam bot reviews on a large enough scale, someone would either have to buy a ton of devices (economically impractical) or associate a large number of accounts with the same device (Garmin would probably notice and ban the accounts.)

I just guessed it was a bug since it seems like placeholder text, and it appeared it various languages, but who knows.

Looking at Spotify now, there aren’t any recent “comments optional” reviews at first glance, but still an overwhelming number of no-text reviews. Basically the review section is useless now. And the sort dropdown doesn’t seem to do anything?