When we announced the Private Alpha run and upcoming Public Pilot of App Mining last month, we were excited to already have two App Reviewers: Democracy Earth and Product Hunt. It has been immensely valuable to hear the feedback and ideas for improving App Mining from community members.
App Reviewers who are purpose-built for evaluating different types of apps, and more importantly different methods of evaluation, make App Mining more robust and less subject to gaming. Ultimately, the proposal and selection of App Reviewers is one of the most important parts of App Mining and the plan is to decentralize that aspect over time with a community vote. Until then, we are owning this effort by building relationships with an early batch of App Reviewers to ensure voting, and this program, are successful.
For community feedback and coordination, linked below is a quick survey to list who you think would make a great App Reviewer for App Mining and why. As we collect responses, we’ll share the growing list publicly so existing Blockstack community members can discuss their merits.
Some of the things we look for when thinking about great potential App Reviewers are:
Do they have proprietary data or methodology that would help them make judgements for why an app might be better than others?
Are there already App Reviewers that evaluate apps using the same criteria? If so, why would this entity be better than or add value to the existing App Reviewers?
Will the proposed App Reviewer grow and improve the quality of the app ecosystem?
How does this app reviewer make App Mining harder to game?
Will the proposed App Reviewer help grow the user base for Blockstack apps? Will their customers and audience become potential new users for certain apps?
App Reviewer candidate - Reach/Mention/Awareness Based
The idea here would be to reward apps that are getting attention and mentions online. Generally, the more visibility they can generate, the more users they can convert.
I like the idea of encouraging app developers to get people talking about their apps, and it seems like this type of app reviewer would help promote that type of activity.
I’ve never used any of these services, but if they’re better than Google Alerts, that’s a good thing!
For sure, Talkwalker bills itself as a ‘better Google Alerts’ while the others play closer to the PR and social worlds and try to track quality mentions from a selectable list of mediums. We’re using Awario and loving the data so far - it even gives back your top influencers and some other information that would help App Miners understand where they’re getting traction.
I have two issues with Reach/Mention/Awareness Based app reviewer, i.e. if awareness affects ranking:
The more money you invest into advertisement/raise awareness, the more money you get from app mining. If the goal is to reward apps with a good marketing budget and strategy than that is ok. However, I hope that this is not the goal. There should be other means to encourage app publishers to raise awareness about their apps. Maybe have a “Awareness mining pool” that gives money to those that rank lowest.
While I haven’t reviewed all competitors there is a lot measuring around centralized services, like twitter, facebook,… If we can find one that values decentralized services like mastadon, peepeth, individual web pages I am much more happy to support this. Maybe have the app review consists of one score from centralized services and one from decentralized services and over time shift the weights towards the latter.
