The Great Ratings War of 2020
Students are trying to remove their most-hated apps from the App Store by flooding them with one-star reviews.
In December of 2019, according to the World Health Organization, “a pneumonia of unknown cause detected in Wuhan, China was first reported to the WHO Country Office in China.” By late February and early March, this novel Coronavirus, which had now been officially named COVID-19, had led to mass school closures across China, with nearly 300 million children now out of school, according to UNESCO. But while these students could not control the fact that they were now stuck at home, away from their school communities and friends, they were able to band together to fight against a common childhood adversary: homework.
They had started online learning using an app called DingTalk, traditionally used as a collaboration platform for workplaces. But according to a report in the London Review of Books, a rumor had started that “if enough users gave the app a one-star review it would get booted off the App Store.” Overnight, the app’s rating went from 4.9 to 1.4. DingTalk even released a video begging people to stop giving it one-star ratings. As of right now, DingTalk is still in the iOS App Store in the US, with a rating of 1.3.
