
What's Up With BBM's Android Reviews? - edent
http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/10/whats-happening-with-bbms-android-reviews/
======
darklajid
Wait, but requiring G+ Accounts for comments and ratings on the Play Store
(TM) improves the quality and makes sure that only _real people_ can
participate and share their opinion. Because people with a Real Name and a
picture aren't as likely to act in a morally questionable way!

I cannot comment on stuff I buy, stopped buying apps for that reason among
others. Ignoring the shills that praise BBM, the Play Store ratings aren't
better than YouTube comments for a long time now and mandating a G+ account
didn't change a damn thing.

~~~
Dirlewanger
_mandating a G+ account didn 't change a damn thing._

It did though, it stopped those who despise G+ from making app reviews
anymore. Sadly though the number of people that stopped is tiny.

~~~
tn13
This is true. I visit the play store to rate my fav. app and close the window
only because Google wants me to create the G+ profile.

~~~
yareally
I quit posting reviews because of the G+ requirement. Wish I could post them
for apps I really love, but I don't want or need a G+ account tied to my
primary Gmail.

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JonSkeptic
Thank you so much HackerNews. I was waiting for this article. Its really
great, easy to read, and smooth.

~~~
alanctgardner2
This is the least funny, most obvious, most completely thoughtless and
content-free post imaginable. I wish I had the ability to hellban you.

~~~
aclevernickname
Wow. Perhaps we can use this as a good example of absolute power corrupting
absolutely?

~~~
alanctgardner2
Wow. That doesn't make _any_ sense. I couldn't have been corrupted by a power
I don't have. If anything, this is a case of everyone being evil, and only
some people acquiring the power to act on it.

~~~
aclevernickname
On behalf of the rest of the world, I thank you for not aiming to acquire that
power, then.

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mathattack
> I seriously doubt BlackBerry would pay for reviews

Why is this such a stretch? Other large hardware companies have done the same.
[1] This isn't to say they have or haven't, just that it's a feasible option
to think they went a little overboard on Mechanical Turk or similar.

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/24/5023658/samsung-
fined-340...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/24/5023658/samsung-
fined-340000-for-posting-negative-htc-reviews)

~~~
Zenst
Agreed also given how many past execs at Blackberry have been done for some
form of insider dealing or another.

Having worked there I will say they are a lieing bunch of untrustful people
managment wise and can even stand up ion a court of law and justify all of
that and more.

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dotmanish
Random theory: BB might have contracted app promotions to a number of
marketing agencies (or just one), and the account manager tasked with
promoting the Android app figured out there's Mechanical Turk and Fiverr.

Now if I talk to couple of friends at digital marketing agencies, they would
tell me this is pretty common. The client doesn't need to know or decide how
it's done. It's just done.

~~~
grhino
I would think established corporations would have strict guidelines on
marketing tactics that are allowed.

~~~
edent
Samsung have just received a large fine in South Korea for this sort of
behaviour. [http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/t/story/taiwan-body-
fines-s...](http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/t/story/taiwan-body-fines-
samsung-defaming-local-rival-20665539)

They hired a small army of commentators to trash HTC and talk up Samsung in
blog comments etc.

------
ufmace
If only the app was actually worth it. I tried it out, and so far: There's a
persistent notification that never goes away, even after you tell Android not
to allow notifications from the app (no idea how they did that, never seen
another app do that) I haven't gotten past the signup yet, even though I got
the email. Seems that the signup process resets if you switch out of the app.
Too bad if you want to use Lastpass to generate a password. After I gave up
and wrote the password down, it decided that I hadn't gotten the approve
email. No amount of clearing data or retrying would convince it otherwise.

~~~
kevb
> There's a persistent notification that never goes away, even after you tell
> Android not to allow notifications from the app (no idea how they did that,
> never seen another app do that)

This is actually a bug in Android 4.3 and nothing malicious on Blackberry's
part. While fixing a bug that allowed apps to start foreground services
without a notification icon, Android 4.3 inadvertently broke user disabling
notifications for foreground services.

------
yesplorer
I received a [spammy] message from one of my Whatsapp contacts with the
content along the line of : In order to unlock the full features of the new
BBM, forwad _blah blah blah_ to 10 of your friends.

It could just be a spammy message that caught on really well and might not
have nothing to do with Blackberry buying fake reviews IMHO

~~~
anonymous
So could this be the next step in forcing people to leave you good reviews?
Set the app up so if you leave a good review there's a 70% chance it will
unlock some optional features. You get a ton of good reviews and plausible
deniability: I mean, it's not like leaving a good review _always_ unlocks the
app. Obviously this isn't some brilliant scheme to jump to the front of
appstore rankings.

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gabemart
Wow. That's _incredibly_ lazy, even for a company that makes its living
selling fake reviews. It would take literally ten minutes to whip up some
spintax [1] that would generate thousands of unique-ish review iterations.
Shoddy work, even for a blackhat.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning)

------
p4bl0
The linked page is entirely empty for me. It keeps being so when I reload.

Also, it's the first time that I see something on /r/funny that lands on the
Hacker News front page a few hours later.

~~~
edent
I'm the author. I've tried on FireFox, Chrome, Android, and it seems to work.
Do you mind if I ask which browser you're using?

Also, if you'd followed me on Twitter, you would have seen this 19 hours ago
;-)
[https://twitter.com/edent/status/393050827570421760](https://twitter.com/edent/status/393050827570421760)

~~~
Amadou
Blank for me too. View source shows the text.

I use NoScript and RequestPolicy. I'm thinking the page is another one of
those that depends so much on javascript that it can't do anything without it.
That's bad for the security of your readers because practically every known
browser exploit in the last decade has had javascript as a necessary component
- so over-use of javascript forces your users to choose between exposing
themselves to increased risk or not reading your content.

Also, javascript performance on mobile is terrible, frequently 10x slower than
desktop, so even if you don't care about the security of your users, the user
experience of your websites is probably going to suffer on mobile.

~~~
edent
That's a fair point. The site should run fine on low end mobile (tested on an
ancient BlackBerry, ironically). I'll see if there's a way to stop reduce the
amount of JavaScript and / or make CloudFlare work in a slightly more sensible
manner.

Thanks for the info.

~~~
dfc
Where is the irony? Or are we eschewing Oxford and Webster's definition and
using Alanis Morrisette's?

~~~
edent
I'm talking trash about BB while using BB for testing.

Granted, it's not the most scintillating use of irony - but it fits the
British definition quite adequately.

Of course, the ironic thing about Alanis Morrisette's song is that it contains
_no_ irony. Which makes it paradoxically ironic.

~~~
dfc
I never realized that the British definition of irony included acting in a
manner contrary to one's stated preferences.

I have heard the "paradoxically ironic" bit from other people before and it
never made any sense to me. A lack of irony is not the same thing as the
opposite of irony. I have also never been able to understand the difference
between "ironic" and "paradoxically ironic."

~~~
edent
See, for example, [http://www.buzzfeed.com/ailbhemalone/the-19-most-ironic-
fact...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/ailbhemalone/the-19-most-ironic-facts-of-all-
time)

~~~
dfc
We are discussing the Queen's English and you refer to a silly slideshow on
Buzzfeed? I think we should pretend this discussion never happened.

------
memracom
Why not contact every one of the people making fake reviews and ask them if
they know how you can earn money for posting reviews. Don't mention BBM, just
about the general idea. Chances are you will either dig up someone who is
running a single campaign for a single app (which may be a BBM clone) or you
will dig up a PR business running lots of these campaigns. Do some
investigative journalism.

~~~
Zenst
Tried that and not one replied, also most appear to be new accoutns and of
indian origin, so I'll presume this is being driven in india.

Either way it is such a scale and using such a copy/paste haord of rating
trolls to 5* it that every one looks the same.

I hope google educates Blackberry and there underhand tasteless tactics in
self masturcation PR.

Laughable thing sis everybody I knew who I could BBM no longer have a device
and with that they missed the boat. Maybe in Asia but too little, too late and
handled far from smoothly.

------
toblender
Has anyone considered that the fans are just trying to keep blackberry alive?

I saw dozen's of people on my facebook friends list post their BBM id and
thanking them...

~~~
joekrill
Sure, that's possible. But then you would expect the "reviews" to not be so
similar. They almost universally say "Thank you so much blackberry team. I was
waiting this app".

------
akumen
BBM on Android is pretty broken in terms of functionality and UI design. Which
is embarassing at the very least. Installed for nostalgic reason and quickly
uninstalled.

~~~
scrabble
As a counter-point, I've got it installed and I like the UI and haven't had
issues with functionality.

The only issue I've had is that adding a user by email address opens your
email client and makes you send an email through it.

------
AshleysBrain
If anyone is after fake 5 star reviews, are they really so primitive as to use
_exactly_ the same wording for every fake review? Not even swapping out the
odd adjective or tweaking the grammar? It seems to just make it totally
trivial to remove, making the whole effort worthless. Of course, maybe they
are changing the wording and just that particular case has come up more than
usual for some reason...

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ChikkaChiChi
What I found most hilarious is that the repeated text is gramatically
incorrect.

"I was waiting this app"

~~~
niuzeta
you found it hilarious. I found it painful.

~~~
Zenst
Best are those that cut and paste the template into the review and failed to
change the default star rating from 1 star -- seen few of those amonst the 5*
spam.

Had fun flagging many of those obvious 5* reviews as spam, I was bored and
sadly no way I could obviously see to flag underhand marketing of an app or
indeed flag an app in any way to google so they may give this the attention it
needs.

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joeblau
Does an app having a lot of 5 star reviews help the application raise it's
status in the store over the long run? Also in the Play Store, does Google
cycle reviews on updates like Apple does?

~~~
potatolicious
Even on Apple's App Store historical 5 star reviews help a lot, since they are
still added to our cumulative average (albeit at a lower weighting). Reviews
for older versions aren't visible individually on the store, but most people
only look at the average star rating, not individual reviews.

------
corresation
Google does zero gate checks on apps before publishing them. As an egregious
example, if you want to post an app called Garageband on the Google store,
calling yourself "Apple Corporation", you can do that. There are no automatic
red flags or name collision issues, and instead the system relies upon enough
complaints that it gets taken down.

Any anticipated app sees dozens if not hundreds of scammer apps on the Play
Store who try to take advantage of that namespace early to deploy ad proxies,
etc.

[http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/10/21/fake-
blackberry-b...](http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/10/21/fake-blackberry-
bbm-apps-still-in-google-play-store-one-month-after-failed-official-release/)

There is some medium ground between fully curated and Wild West that needs to
be found.

There have been countless fake BBM products on the Play store. They each have
thousands of such reviews, official sounding publishers, making it incredibly
difficult to blame the user when they install some of this junk.

~~~
micampe
Seems plausible, so much so that this is also what the article is saying.

------
bennyg
Just checked iOS - no funky reviews there, just a load of people saying how
the app is broken.

