iTunes App Store Comments: A broken system

Commenting on Commenters

One of the major complaints (especially from developers) of the iTunes App Store is the comment system. First, let's take a look at a couple of the gems I've run across. This one for Twitterrific:

Stupid.. ★

by medicated

So... Twitter is really stupid and an annoying waste of time. And somehow this app just makes it worse.

What an excellent addition to the list of already wonderful comments. It appears that this person hasn't even downloaded and used the app. Feeling so strongly that Twitter is "stupid" they had to write a negative review having never tried it. 

And now another for Exposure:

No Upload? ★★

by Terrible0ne

Is it that hard to make a free app that let's you upload geotagged pix to flickr and then view them on the map at flickr?

My sense is that Terrible0ne has little to no idea what it takes to concept, program, and polish an iPhone app. Now I could be wrong, he might be the genius developer behind some App Store standouts, but I highly doubt it. 

Differences Between Music and Application Comments

Music and movies never change. When someone comments on a Cold Play song it will forever apply. It's set. Applications are completely different. Updates fix bugs and add features. Comments don't reflect this. A commenter might complain about a bug that is present in 1.0, but fixed in 1.1. Unfortunately for the developer that comment is cemented in place for eternity. NetNewsWire represents an excellent example of this.

Nice idea, but ★★

by macguyincali

Those of us who are power users of NetNewsWire on the mac and have a lot of subscriptions, the iPhone application gets so bogged down downloading feeds that it is virtually unusable. I'm hoping they give us some more options for at least choosing a smaller subset of subscriptions or at least make it snappier with the larger set. I have yet to be able to successfully use it as it spends freezes up while waiting to download the hundreds of feeds I have.

This was a legitimate complaint about the 1.0 release of NNW. If you had hundreds of feeds it would take forever to load. Fortunately, Brent is an excellent Mac developer and listened to the complaints and (for the most part) resolved this issue in a later update. NNW now has the ability to remove feeds from showing up on your iPhone (Engadget and Gizmodo were immediately removed for me as they update way too frequently during the day). Unfortunately for Brent that comment is one of the "most helpful" and still shows up near the top of the comments (and more importantly, on the front page). 

Solutions?

One suggestion is that you shouldn't be allowed to comment on an application unless you have downloaded it. To me, this seems like a fantastic idea. It creates a barrier to entry just like the $99 fee to get your application on the iTunes Store. This barrier would help eliminate some of the crap. Obviously some of the crap will still come through (just look at the 50% of what's on the App Store), but imagine if that $99 fee wasn't there. It would be infinitely worse.

Could another possible solution be that you have different comments for each version of the application? The advantage would be that comments about a resolved issue would no longer be present. The disadvantage would be that an applications rating and list of comments would be reset each time. This might give developers incentive to release "updates" just to clear out any unwanted comments. 

Any other thoughts on how Apple can fix the comment system?