I never liked having star ratings. I think they are worthless.
Reviews that actually use sentences to convey meaning are more useful. I can see that the rating helps to know which review to read, but in that case, they must go together. No rating witout some words.
But any time you are giving the public a chance to rank something, you will have gaming(bots and incentivized reviews) and fake accounts and spammers and need a lot of moderators to handle it all.
The more ways to provide information for the user to determine if the extension fits his need, the better. Ratings donāt offer that at all. They only indicate which reviews to read.
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Admittedly, Iāve historically tended to skip 1-star and 5-star reviews in WP-land. I mean, in well over ten years, Iāve seen very few plugins that warrant either rating, so, I tend to attribute those ratings (perhaps not entirely fairly, I admit) to the āfanboysā (as it were) and āhatersā (for lack of a better word.) Gutenberg is a great example. While I donāt care for the functionality and the force-fed nature of it, the ratings tend to lie at the extremes even though itās neither a 1-star nor a 5-star product.
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I see a discussion about how to reinvent the wheel.
Where is the best review system. Yes, the site who started it all: Amazon.com.
Ratings of the reviews (most usefull review), top reviewers, etc., etc.
Perfect system? Probably, not. But much better than anywhere else.
At first, we should just copy Amazonās system, and only then discuss how to improve and adjust to our needs. Though, from the first sight, I didnāt see any improvements needed. So, just copy it.
Amazon has the ability to confirm whether someone made a verified purchase though.
While there is still room for gaming the system, that helps a lot.
We can have āPurchased onā¦ (date)ā or similar option to premium or freemium plugins, this can help too.
We canāt escape gamification altogether. Even Google canāt. But we can learn from the best and implement the best practices.
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