Bad reviews/ratings never expire - Need a way to filter them out or statistically weight them
TLDR
Unlike positive reviews, negative ratings/reviews should have a limited shelf life.
If I am not mistaken (based on my casual observations) that is not the case right now, and if so, they tarnish apps' reputation forever.
The problem
One issue I have with GNOME Software's reviews/ratings system is that it does not seem to accurately depict applications that have undergone drastic quality improvements throughout their development history.
As of 2023, I see lots of apps that have a handful of reviews from the last 1-2 years, and then as you scroll you quickly get into reviews from 2018, 2016, etc., so when you get into reviews and ratings that are more than 1 or 2 years old, that's aeons in the world of IT and FLOSS in particular.
Generally speaking, I think that good ratings are pretty much valid forever as indicators of an app's public appreciation, whereas negative ratings/reviews are often the result of transient bugs that occurred in a particular release or in early days, or sometimes users complaining about things that are not even bugs in the apps—and we all know how most people who bother rating/reviewing things on the Internet tend to be people who complain rather than people who appreciate.
It's unlikely that an open source app becomes meaningfully worse over time, whereas it's much more likely that it keeps improving with every release (unlike in the proprietary software world).
Possible approaches
Short of being able to allow users to modify their old past reviews (even if they're on different computers now), i.e. #1777) and suggesting/prompting users to revisit their negative reviews/ratings and potentially adjust them upon new releases of their app, I think that negative reviews/ratings should have an automatic expiry. Particularly with:
- Reviews that cannot be associated to "live" machines/accounts/etc. after more than 18 months (i.e. no pulse)
- Apps that follow rapid release cycles / have had more than a handful of releases since the reviews occurred
With rapid-release apps, I believe it is meaningless to keep old complaints around, at least unfiltered by default (maybe the UI could offer a filter combobox/buttons for "Last 12 months", "Last 2 years", "Last 3 years", "Last 5 years", defaulting to last 12 months); or a spinbutton widget for the number of months).
Presumably replying "No" to "Was this review useful?" a couple times gets that review pulled off eventually, but it's unclear how that works (if it does) and as there doesn't seem to be clearly visible data on this; also this voting only applies to reviews, not ratings. And maybe there should be a third choice besides Yes/No: "Obsolete" (with a tooltip "Flag this review as obsolete" or something like that, but I still think auto-pruning with time would be more convenient for everybody).
There may be other statistical methods to consider, but I don't know what else to suggest for now...