As a Turkish Android user (not a developer, I just helped some developers by means of graphic design and Turkish language packs) let me speak my mind.

This thing is pretty new. I can't make a proper judgement of apps because of this new meme. I want to see international or English comments, but I can't without changing my language preferences. I guess it goes like this:

These people are mostly 10-15 years old, English-illiterate teens. Since Google uses real names on comments(Google+), they want to be seen with their names. I guess they show this to their friends, family, etc.. They feel like they are contributing maybe(?!) They seek for attention (?!) Or maybe it is just for trolling...

When you use Google Play on your PC, you can click on the names of the commentators. Maybe they think that it is a some kind of communication way :S Something like "add/PM me if you like". Weird.

When I check local reddit-like website of Turkey (eksisözlük), there are many people who are annoyed by this new meme. (https://eksisozluk.com/yorumum-gozuksun-diye-1-yildiz--41109...)

To sum up, I think this is really annoying, when I check the Google+ profiles of these 1-star-commentators, I see some non-english-speaking people or attention-seeking teens.

But what about Google Play's algorithm? Does it make sense? One-line-long comments with 1 star are being seen on front page of the apps... What about 2/3/4/5 starred useful comments? Why does Google Play show only 1-starred ones? It does not make sense at all. And these teens are just exploiting this. Why does Google Play's system accept 1-star comments as more helpful than others?

Likely, it's trying to show a helpful good and a helpful bad review next to each other. Amazon, etc all do this as well. I guess they haven't had as many issues with people exploiting it because you can rate reviews as helpful or not. Google should introduce a helpful or not helpful up/down rating for reviews which should solve this problem. Or a "This user is an idiot" button that, if enough people click, the review is thrown out. And, if enough people click it on multiple apps for the same user's reviews, they are banned from reviewing.

Actually there is such a helpfulness rating; thumbs up/thumbs down option for every review. I did not check on phone, but Google Play for desktop has that kind of system. I guess the problem is... nobody cares to vote.

I think the issue is most people don't use Google Play on the desktop to look at reviews and such. I have, I think, once. I generally only use Google Play on my Android devices.

> The crude and seemingly insensitive way is to just prevent Turkish reviewers from commenting. Or even better hellban them and never account for their score.

Maybe don't provide a guaranteed way to appear in the displayed comments? I'd expect this to spread outside of Turkey pretty quickly.

This is pretty sad for other Turkish people, who seeks proper reviews and know proper rating mentality. It is like hell for me. I translated an app to Turkish and wanted to check if there is any translation related comments. It blew my mind. There was 1 review in terms of new translation pack. The rest was 1-star reviews. I started to downvote these reviews (thumb down), but I guess no one cares enough to vote up or down useful reviews. There has to be another way. I guess voting anonymously will be the solution. Thanks to Google's Google+ integration, some stupid attention seekers want to show their full name on apps' first pages.

I don't even understand why a 1 star review would automatically appear, and a 5 star review wouldn't. What possible justification is there for that?

Anyway, Google has a few ways they could fix this:

* Allow users to rate reviews. Amazon does this. Why not Google? Or maybe rate reviewers, and don't show any reviews from notorious idiots. * Interpret the text of the review and check if it matches the score. Show those reviews that sound like they have something interesting to say. If any company can implement this, it's Google. * Separate reviews by country.

This could be better phrased. How about "don't require people to leave one-star reviews if they want to appear in the comments".

Hi, I can say Google translate did good enough job.

The speculation here in Turkey is that these are just kids. I see lots of complains from Turkish users on lot's of websites. Many Turks are switching to English just to get rid of this kind of comments.

How did you conclude that "It seems it's just for Turkey". As far as I can see the OP has not done much analysis either and based his comments on a few comments. The only significant analysis I've seen is done by diziet below.

What I meant was that clicking that review link shows a localized page with Turkish reviews and his US (default?) review links doesn't show that anomaly.

But, it seems the total review average and review count is an aggregate of all localized review sites. So a pathological site will affect the average rating, without non-native speakers getting to read those ridiculous reviews and decided how unhelpful they are.

Sorry it was just my talking out loud figuring out how reviews on Play store are supposed to work.

is the Turkish language read from right to left? maybe they are counting stars from the wrong side.

No, it's read left to right.

In 1928 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk started a plan[1] to ditch the old form of written Turkish (Ottoman Turkish which was RTL[2]) and implement one based on the latin alphabet in order to fight a huge illiteracy problem at the time.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Kemal_Atat%C3%BCrk#Mode...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_alphabet

Let me assure you, they know that 1 star is bad, 5 star is good. Even courses are rated between 1(bad)-5(good) in school reports. They also say that "I just rated 1 star to be seen, BUT it is a wonderful app", etc. I saw some comments like this : "I say hi to my cousin, this game is so fun. But I am giving 1 star to be on top." They are trolling and do not care or do not know about total rating system.