The App Store Could Really Use Something Similar to the Yelp Review Filter
Friday, February 17th, 2012
I created my Yelp profile in early 2010. I'd used the site for years before then, but for whatever reason, I didn't feel compelled to start writing reviews until a few years ago. Yelp, in the off chance you've never heard of it, is a massive community-driven site which primarily focuses on offering honest customer reviews for all sorts of businesses. It's equally useful to find a place to get lunch, somewhere to get your hair cut, a cool shoe store, or a million other things. Taking a step back, there's tons of similarities between Yelp and the App Store, but Yelp does two things that make a massive difference.
Just like how you can find listings for anything from a roller-skate repair shop to a studio to learn fencing, you can equally come up with just about anything on the App Store. Both feature an insurmountable amount of content that's hard to even imagine, and both Yelp and the App Store orbit around an equally important customer review system. Sure, sites like ours provide a more "official" venue for long-form reviews, just like a proper newspaper columnist would offer restaurant reviews, but I'd argue that a platform for legitimate customer reviews is just as useful.
"Legitimate" being the key word here. Developers on our forums have encouraged players to leave reviews for their games since, well, the birth of the review system. This sort of vague motivation generally results in reviews which I'd describe as both thoughtful and extremely useful for fellow App Store shoppers. Whether the particular review has a positive or negative slant usually doesn't matter, as people who are leaving reviews just for the sake of leaving reviews often form at least a semi-intelligent argument for why you should (or shouldn't) download something.
Then two things started happening.
