2w ago

Someone left this review on my free Reddit client rdx for Reddit

Like what do I even do at this point. Its a free app and these reviews hurt app store performance,

116 comments

Standard reply:
Dear sir or madam:
Some crackpot has written me an abusive message, and it seems they used your account to send it. I'm replying to you as a courtesy in case you wish to take action against this lunatic.
- I'm guessing you're basing it off of this official legal correspondence, which I am including below for people who haven't seen it:
  Dear Mr. Cox:
  Attached is a letter that we received on November 19, 1974. I feel that you should be aware that some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters.
  Very truly yours,
  CLEVELAND STADIUM CORP.
  James N. Bailey, General Counsel
  cc: Arthur B. Modell
  
  Not that, specifically, though it might be indirectly?
  I'm basing it off of one of Gyles Brandreth's yarns where he described how he dealt with abusive constituents when he was a MP.
  Dear sir or madam:
  Some crackpot has written me an abusive letter, and they've signed your name at the bottom. [...]
  Whether he came up with that or adapted it from something prior, I don't know.
- Is there a They/Them for Sir or Madam? Must include that as well.
  
  Sadam.
  
  I'd guess "To whom it may concern" would be the most gender neutral/inclusive way to rephrase that.
  
  Not that I know of. Unless someone has stated their gender or pronouns, I just use people's names and avoid anything that assumes or implies gender.
  
  "Dearest snookums"
  
  "Sir or Madam" already is a "They/Them".
  
  If you believe my therapist friend who is also non-normative in a relevant fashion, demands for pronouns are often 'othering' in result, and thus go from farce to force.
  So, I write fewer email.

Like writing a product review and giving one star for shipping speed lol.
- Or recipe reviews.
  "I didn't have flour, so I substituted lard. I also didn't have sugar, so I substituted salted cod. Worst cake ever. 1 star."
- I loved this idea it was exactly what was described but I wanted a different color 1/5 stars
  
  This item funtioned exactly as intended but didnt do what i wanted it to do.
  One star.
- I read somewhere that the best places to eat are Yelp 2 star places where the reviewer whines about service. It suggests the reviewer wanted to give a 1 star review because they were mad but had to concede that the food was good, hence 2 stars.
  
  And then they take 2h to get your food, you find the waiter's entire ponytail in it, and you're yelled at if you don't tip 50%? Idk man, some restaurants get bad reviews for service because they have bad service. And having bad service detracts from the experience of going out to eat.
- on the French Amazon I once bought Argan oil and one of the 1 star reviews was "very disappointed, smells and feels like oil".
  I kid you not.

"This oven is horrible! 0 stars! Everything my wife makes on it or in it tastes terrible, "
Sorry, yo. Ya can't fix stupid.
- Haha you made my day!

That's like being mad at the bus because your chosen destination for the day sucked.
- https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/mad/
  
  'Murican voters.
- The stupid bus made it rain!

That was a very diplomatic response to some stupid asshole like this.
- Too diplomatic even.
  
  Are you allowed to respond honestly?
  If you made a response like:
  "Dear reviewer,
  When I wrote the code for this app, which displays content from reddit that I have no control over, I never envisioned some fuckwit moron would be so stupid that he or she would get mad at the App for just displaying what's on reddit.
  In the future, I'll add a disclaimer that goes "Are you some anti-DEI piece of shit who thinks everything is Woke? Press the large red button icon below to only see the "based" subreddit." I hope this will help you understand how to use this App, you fucking idiot.
  Sincerely, Developer"
  would that get your kicked off the store?

Can you report the review as not relevant?
- Probably. I have no experience with the Google Play Store end of things, but we've gotten non-reviews written by crackpots removed from our Google Business profile by just pointing out to Google that they were either off topic or from someone who we could not identify in any of our records as being a person who actually did business with us.
  For example, there was one guy who went around copy-pasting the same one star rant to seemingly every retail business in the city whining about mask requirements during COVID, which didn't have jack monkey squat do to with us and was in fact a state government mandate that we did not control. As a public business we have to comply with the law. Google took that one down when we reported it, although I still see examples of the same screed from the same guy attached to other businesses who apparently didn't have the wherewithal to complain.
  I imagine "app that serves third party content the author doesn't control and reviewer is complaining about the content not the app" is a situation that is very well understood at Google. Whether or not you can make them give a shit is a different question...
  
  I used to work at the pub in England and the landlord used to write the insane reviews on the chalkboard.
  Sure they pulled down your ratings but if you're at 4.9 anyway it doesn't really matter and it's better to showcase the insane reviews than the actually legitimately negative ones.
  The best one was the guy that tried to sue us because he was stung by a bee. Because apparently the bees work for us.
- I have reported it to Apple, let’s see.
  
  I hope they delete it. Good luck!

If he think Reddit hates his conservative views, he’d explode if he came here
- It would explode his head
- He'd be blocked banned defederated very quickly
  
  Defederating an instance because it had one conservative user thta was already banned
- It’s funny when someone mildly conservative shows up here.

Classic right-wing nut "You have to listen and like what I say or it's CeNSOrShIp"

How does it work after the API butchering?
- Yeah I’m curious too! What technical sorcery is OP doing for presumably free API access
  
  Their themes were sexy as well. Infinite scrolling was off by default, I have to say if I weren't avoiding going back to reddit, it looks pretty great.

What a fucking idiot holy shit.

I thought reddit killed third party apps? Or are you paying the $10,000,000 per month or whatever it is?
- It just scrapes for data, you can’t log in, post, or comment so no need to use the API
  
  lol nice.
  But if you can’t login, how is this angry user going to customize his feed?

Just challenge the review because it's not about the app? If you can't do that, then just let it go.

How dare you make a woke app. /s

Ahh they stepped out of their echochamber because the app shows r/all if youre not subscribed to any subreddit. Also, sometimes im forced to use reddit, love your app.

hey man i use your app rdx. My only sane reason to browse reddit…..thank you for making it….i wish search suggestions were better ( eg . if specific subredit is not famous , it wont index and show under search suggestions real time as i am typing )
- In next update.

Reddit is so liberal /s
- It is. Lemmy is further left, but Reddit is absolutely left of center.
- Its run by Zios
  
  The pizzeria?!? It all maQes sense now

"Tell me you don't know how reddit works without saying you don't know how reddit works."
- I'm giving 1-star ratings to weather apps because it's too cold outside.
  
  You joke but meteorologists have received threats because they forecast bad weather on special events.
- This person sounds insane like one of those people who lives in an RV with signs all over it talking about 5G nanobots and how water causes cancer.
  
  There's a park in my area. Literally every time I have been there, over several years, there is a van in the parking lot. It has a wire mesh bust of Hillary Clinton on top, and is covered with writings about various conspiracy theories about her, and slogans like "Hillary for Jail!"
  Possibly the craziest thing I've ever seen.
  
  There's a park in my area. Literally every time I have been there, over several years, there is a van in the parking lot. It has a wire mesh bust of Hillary Clinton on top, and is covered with writings about various conspiracy theories about her, and slogans like "Hillary for Jail!"
  Possibly the craziest thing I've ever seen.
- They probably don't understand how anything works because they think learning about stuff is "wOkE" and anyone who disagrees with them is a "leftist".

You can report these.

What a dipshit...

You were way too kind and accommodating towards that piece of shit.
- probably the kind of person to scream "woke DEI" everytime they see someone who isn't white working at burger king.

Oh boohooh did the poor wittle "conservative" encounter pushback on its silly wittle Fox-news-adled ideas?

American “conservatives” are a scourge.
- All of them are

How do these apps still work? Aren't the apis fucked? Is this just some fancy browser with extra steps?
- I'm on Android so I didn't look into OP's app. I just went looking into it after this post. Apparently if you create your own developer app ID and patch an app to use yours instead, I guess your usage is too low for Reddit to bill. Something like that.
  
  fyi rdx is on android too https://overdevs.com/rdx
- Boost on Android still works if you mod any subreddits.

That's super dumb. Also, I thought there weren't 3rd party Reddit apps anymore? Do you not still have to pay for the API?
- Third party apps with small users bases or ones that are used by people with disabilities (that have disability features) still work. For now. Also apps that allow for a read only view (meaning they can't be used to sign in, write/post comments, or upvote/downvote) also still work I believe.
- There's a few tricks around it. Web scraping, for example. I could also see like a webview portal with a custom layout

I see this all the time on user reviews. A quarter of them are just people bitching about partisan politics.

I hope there’s a way to have the review removed for being irrelevant. I love your app btw, please keep it up. The only issue that’s kinda annoying right now is that I lose my place in the feed when I swipe back out from a post.

I’m going to give you a five star review to balance it. (Swiss app store)

Love your app, OP.
- Seconded, it's amazing for occasional reddit use when you don't want your eyeballs seared by the normal interface!
- Thank you so much!

i'm so tired of lazy greedy developers implying i'm a moron with their radical leftist "code"

No reason to engage an idiot, not like you're going to change his mind.
- That's not the point. When you respond to reviews like this the goal is to point out to everyone else who might be reading it that the reviewer is in fact a nut, and therefore their opinion should be discarded out of hand.

You're responding to a Steve sock puppet account. It might not be him on the other end, likely it isn't, but it's his. He wants all the money and doesn't like to share because he's a greedy little pigboy.

I use RDX still if my Internet searches come up with a reddit page (technical troubleshooting)
Excellent app

Hey I have done actual feedback/ issues with the app.
About half the time i try to load a video it fails to open it. This can occur on comments too.
Also sometimes going to a sub reddit and then a post then hitting back button on android will cause it to completely close the app, like the breadcrumbs history is missing so it thinks you just want to quit vs go back to the sub reddit or home.
Thanks a bunch for making it, it does make browsing possible on mobile like 50%of the time :D
- I had issues with the video player as well. I solved it by clearing my cache for the app.
  Never experienced your other issue though.
- Hey, vacationing right now. Will go back tomorrow and then check out the bugs you have reported.

This is a troll. Nobody truly with that view would copy paste to all the search results instead of just the official app.
- You wildly underestimate how stupid and/or ignorant people are.

The Reddit populace is pretty leftie. Except for the occasional brave soul commenting here and there, you have to search out certain subreddits to hear conservative views.
Not that your app has anything to do with that, of course.
- To a "conservative" reality itself must seem extremely left-wing. It's just their warped perspective.
- I'd say it is (was? It's been ~a year and a half since I used it consistently but I'm guessing it hasn't changed too much since then) moderately left by US standards but definitely not progressive left - you don't have to go very far to find thinly-veiled sexism/racism/homophobia, though that might just be because a large portion of the people there are terminally online in a bad way. That being said, there are definitely also communities ranging from conservative to hardcore conservative as well but I actively tried to avoid those so I didn't really see them in my feeds. The same is true with progressive communities but they tended to drift away from being actually progressive once they got to a certain size.

this is what happens when you censor only one wing in social media
- You're left with wing nuts?

Your first error was to create a reddit app.
Your second error was to not create or contribute to a Lemmy app instead.
Hope that helped. :)
- Why not contribute to Mbin & PieFed ?
  
  And this is actually the issue. As a developer I want to build and app based on what interests me. Then I want to write a post about it.
  The comments:
  person 1: Why would you waste your time building an app for that platform, you should build an app for this platform that way less people use”
  person 2: “nah that’s a waste of time you should build an app for this even more niche platform with even less users”
  person 3: “you should just use RSS feeds and anything else is a waste of time”
  Me as a developer “thanks guys I just wanted to build an app for a platform I’m passionate about”
  Wrote this comment on my own lemmy client, because I like using about lemmy :)
  
  That's fine as well.

116 comments