2022
About a couple of weeks ago, a local guide discovered that you can attain an additional five points for leaving detailed reviews, and further discussion was undertaken about the scaling of these extra points. Google understands the concerns of local guides regarding to many users only writing single-worded reviews such as "Good" or "Ok" to accrue easy points which in accordance with the Google Review policies, is very spammy and not an honest representation of their experience.
In a nutshell, this is a a bit of what the feature might prospectively look like, as well as illustrating a feature request that is along the lines of the character counter on Twitter.
Here's how it might work:
- Start writing a review. As your review gets longer the circle below on the bottom-right starts to colour in.
- Once you're twenty characters from 200 characters, a number will start to count down.
- Once you've hit 200 characters, the circle will show a tick and you can continue to write your review, up to a hard limit of 4,000 characters.
- Hit "POST" and you will see that you have earned bonus points.
It's exciting news. Although there's been a delay in the rolling out for Android devices, I think this additional feature request would be great because the character counter is still discreet enough not to make too much of a fuss or be easily noticed. Of course there are philosophies that our reviews should be short and sweet and with a stark focus on quality rather than quantity, but to strike a balance between your one-worded ones and your comprehensive reviews would be much easier, because it is a lot more harder to spam longer reviews without being noticed.
In addition, I proposed a different points scaling system, because at this rate, someone who has written a short 4 character review (e.g. "Good") in comparison to someone who almost misses out on the additional five points because they wrote a 199 character review will both get the same amount of points. So I decided in fairness to modify it slightly to give the benefit of the doubt in terms of fairness and equal rewarding.
Having other users find and mark your review as helpful should also reward you with points, so the distribution of additional points is given where it's due. Of course the scaling will also account into different languages and the property length of each of their translations, so with no doubt we will see higher quality reviews when this feature is rolled out.
Reviews and ratings are increasingly becoming the catalyst and the bread and butter of our current society due to the widespread influence of social media. Be creative, honest, keep them relevant, but most of all have fun! Who knows? Maybe one day it will be you who will be reviewed instead!
