Yesterday, reports had emerged that Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel didn’t want to expand into countries like India and Spain because they were too “poor”. “This app is only for rich people,” Spiegel had supposedly said. And now Indians are letting Spiegel know what they think of his comments.

Between 4th-27th March, Snapchat received 23,000 one star ratings. From then to now, it has received 2,37,000 — meaning that over 2 lakh Indians have hit Snapchat with a one star rating over the last 24 hours. (Source)

I thought of analysing the reviews and see what exactly people had an issue with.

—

First things first - Get the reviews!

I somehow had to scrape the reviews from Playstore. Came across this great library written in Node.js. After setting it up, it only took 5 mins to scrape the reviews, but Playstore allowed me to only scrape the latest 111 pages, each having approximately 40 reviews. Then it gave this error:

For some reason it doesn’t allows you to scrape the 112th page so finally, I got 4,462 reviews to refer.

—

Now I needed a text visualization tool to infer what majorly people had to say. On googling a bit, I found this tool. Easy to upload data and did most of the job. Here’s what it looked like:

—

In total there were 61,402 words written and with 4,613 unique word forms.

Average Words Per Sentence: 20.1

In reviews people don’t usually write more words while giving a good review, they write more words when they usually have a bad experience. So this definitely wasn’t a good sign.

Most frequent words in the corpus: app (2253); ð (1592); poor (1536); ceo (1061); à (1023)

“ð” here represents the middle-finger emoji. Seems like things are going to get a lot serious soon.

This is how the emoji linked with other words:

Seems like a lot of middle-fingers were referred to the “app”, “ceo” and for calling India “poor”. Wait why “ceo”, why not “evan”?

Roughly 1,166 users referred Evan as ‘ceo’ or ‘mr.ceo’ and only 99 referred him as ‘evan’. This gives a nice guess that only 10% of the people knew what the context and were upset with Evan for saying such a statement and nearly 90% just followed others without having an clue!

—

Most people had hate comments about the ‘app’ and the ‘ceo’, but here are some of the unusual things they had to say:

1. Around 64 individuals commented about India being ‘culturally’ rich.
2. Some 40 people even compared Evan with Mukesh Ambani and how Ambani could buy Snapchats 7 times, to prove that India is not poor. No idea how they came up with 7 multiple :P

—

Do comment if you also find some unusual things that people had to say about this incident!