Why App Store commenting is badly flawed.

I look through my reviews everyday to see if people like or dislike Camera Genius. I also  see if they have feature requests or if they have problems with the app.

People have a lot of nice things to say overall and a lot of great suggestions.  However a few reviews are quite mean.  Unfortunately the worse ones have a tendency to bubble to the top.  Even though a bunch of people seem to not find the review helpful, it seems they still get to the top of the pile because Apple apparently only counts the yes for a review. They do nothing with users who didn’t find it helpful and marked no. 

It’s interesting because I think someone who has a problem with an app has a greater chance of coming back and figuring out how can they hurt you so they vote the bad reviews up after writing a review.  Someone who likes your program will come to the app store and write you a nice review. Sometimes they may even look at the reviews that are bad and say well that wasn’t my experience I am going to rank that review down. Unfortunately this has absolutely no effect on the bad reviews standing.  They never realize that what would really help more than anything else is voting up some of the highly ranked good reviews that they found helpful. 

I have no problem with someone writing a bad review.  It’s their choice and they paid money for the app.  I just wish that before they wrote it, they would come to me for some help.  I see many of the 1 star reviews could easily be resolved with a simple email.  

Maybe Apple needs to rethink how reviews are sorted so they are more fairly ranked.  As it stands now the bad reviews have a huge advantage over good reviews.