[ummwhat]

The confusion arises because I'm not at all talking about filtering rotten content (aka facebooks instance of the problem). I'm talking about sorting for good content, possibly identifying a niche hit in a stack of shovelware. On the surface these are very different tasks but they are both manifestations of what I'm calling the fundemental problem. The task of curating, that is identifying the content of incoming data to either sort or filter it, must still be done by hand and thus rarely if ever pays for itself. Sure 900k is a rounding error to Apple, but how much do they make off that 900k? And keep in mind the 900k figure was a bare minimum just to accomplish 5 ratings.

The issue is that if you want to identify content as "fun", "offensive", "dramatic", "tense", "crass" or any other of the myriad of labels that haven't been machine learned, very quickly the labor to generate these labels will cost more than the value generated by these labels.

[BRAlNlAC]

Thanks, this makes much more sense. Typically we’ve used the market as a judge/pre-judge, but low inspiration me-too content in an opaque marketplace seems to disrupt this model significantly. It seems to me the value, especially for Apple, would be from having a better store UX. Tags that find users good stuff may not lead to Gems that you can pump to get more sales, but it might mean on-boarding a % more users per quarter to your service/ecosystem—especially over time as reputation builds. Conversely, if the App Store becomes too cluttered with garbage users may lose interest in the device or even ecosystem entirely if the quality of new apps they discover drops off dramatically due to a lack of tools/curation. An efficient curated store certainly improves the feeling of an experience versus one loaded with junk. Tagging isn’t trivial, however it can lead to a much better experience.