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JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

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Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#131

Post by 7bit »

yladiz wrote: post #124
sgt wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally I'd agree but this is a project that has changed significantly over a verey short period of time. Those reviews may simply not be relevant anymore. I trust that JetBrains going forward will simply respond to the reviews, not remove them.

They should have responded to them in the first place, not removed them, and state that the issue has been fixed and invite the commenter to try again. I wouldn’t trust them to not remove reviews until they start not doing it.

And then the reviews would not have been changed by their authors anyway, because that's not something people typically do. So you still have a bunch of negative reviews for issues that have long been fixed. And that's not fair. If you handle critic and improve, then thats a positive thing that should not be punished by an obsolete negative review.

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#132

Post by yladiz »

7bit wrote: post #131
yladiz wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should have responded to them in the first place, not removed them, and state that the issue has been fixed and invite the commenter to try again. I wouldn’t trust them to not remove reviews until they start not doing it.

And then the reviews would not have been changed by their authors anyway, because that's not something people typically do. So you still have a bunch of negative reviews for issues that have long been fixed. And that's not fair. If you handle critic and improve, then thats a positive thing that should not be punished by an obsolete negative review.

This is kind of the reality of ratings online: you have to accept that someone could leave a bad review about something that you’ve fixed, or even arbitrary. In general if you’re doing a good job the positive reviews will eventually counter the bad ones. It’s arguably not fair but 1. in this case maybe they should have put more care into the initial release, and 2. I, not the company, would rather be the one to judge the review and the response because I don’t have an incentive to hide negative things about the product.

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#133

Post by tacker2000 »

terminalbraid wrote: post #52

The second a better product comes along I'm moving away from Jetbrains. Unfortunately I think we're about to get into an IDE winter since everything thinks all problems should just be solved by AI rather than doing the hard work like "good refactoring tools" and "acceptable user experience".

I got into Vim (NeoVim) recently, after coding in a multitude of IDEs for the last 15yrs.

I spent about a month getting to grips with it, and now i feel more productive than ever, and I regret not doing it sooner!

Also I can rest assured that it will be forever free, no more annoying licenses to deal with.

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#134

Post by ingvar77 »

From consumer perspective, I’m actually not against this probably. Would be nice to have way to give more weight to reviews relevant to current product version. Old reviews are very confusing for consumers since they basically provide false information about the product.

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#135

Post by atombender »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #104
nojs wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what they’re evidently trying to do, but it means they’re moving too slow and the AI integration feels like a bolted on afterthought (hence the reaction to failed features like this). I am a lifetime user of PyCharm but the reality is that Cursor is just so much more productive now. “Junie” is a decent attempt but nowhere close to Cursor yet.

If I rename a function in Cursor, will it modify the name everywhere in the codebase? (I honestly don't know)

Yes, but it will be very, very slow (think minutes for a not particularly large codebase), and probably contain mistakes. It's not at all comparable to refactoring tools like Jetbrains' rename tool.

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#136

Post by rom16384 »

Latty wrote: post #57
buybackoff wrote: post #26

I'm really concerned over the last couple of years that my two paid subscriptions (work/personal) go into AI BS development I do not need, instead of fixing pain points I have daily. It may continue for so long. I hope to see they defend the removal of AI assistant completely, by moving it completely off the main channel. They are not MSFT that can waste a billion here and there. Every AI feature they make is paid by…

Yeah, I cancelled my subscription when it became clear they just did not care about my custom any more. The core products had pain points just sat with open issues forever, and they just started doing nothing but trying to upsell me on stuff I didn't care about or want. I used to be a huge evangelist for JetBrains products, I loved having a product where I felt like I could just pay and get something of quality, it's…

I've also cancelled my Intellij Ultimate subscription, because I feel Jetbrains lost its direction. They've made the classic interface a plugin and replaced it with a VSCode lookalike, and didn't have an integrated AI assistant that accepts your own API key. I'm ok with them selling their own AI subscriptions but let me use AI autocomplete on my pro subscription without further charges as long as I supply the LLM model API.

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#137

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

7bit wrote: post #131
yladiz wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should have responded to them in the first place, not removed them, and state that the issue has been fixed and invite the commenter to try again. I wouldn’t trust them to not remove reviews until they start not doing it.

And then the reviews would not have been changed by their authors anyway, because that's not something people typically do. So you still have a bunch of negative reviews for issues that have long been fixed. And that's not fair. If you handle critic and improve, then thats a positive thing that should not be punished by an obsolete negative review.

> And then the reviews would not have been changed by their authors anyway, because that's not something people typically do. So you still have a bunch of negative reviews for issues that have long been fixed. And that's not fair.

That is more fair than Jetbrains removing other people's negative reviews unilaterally, especially when it remains to be seen whether Jetbrains actually fixed the issues.

Legally, Jetbrains is allowed to be judge, jury, and executioner of reviews on their own site. Morally, they should not act unilaterally, and should gain customer approval before harming customers.

> If you handle critic and improve

You are assuming they improved. With the reviews deleted, there is no way to know for sure, they could just as easily have gotten worse and hidden it by deleting the review. That's why you don't delete the review.

The proper move here would indeed be to post a reply, and have a public conversation. Readers of reviews can then read the reply, and either trust them at their word that they fixed it with no bugs or other mistakes, or test for themselves.

tl;dr: the reviewer, not the biased company being reviewed, is the judge of whether the issues described in the review have been addressed / fixed / made irrelevant. YES, there may be downsides to this, but they are not as bad as the downsides of the alternative (company deletes arbitrary reviews about themselves for arbitrary reasons with no oversight).

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#138

Post by notyourwork »

bigyabai wrote: post #72
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

…why can’t I edit this 9-minute old comment for formatting? @dang

Apparently some accounts can have their edit window muzzled if a moderator chooses to. I have a reduced 10 minute edit window that was applied to my account without notice or explanation, it's fully possible that you might have one too.

How do you know what your edit window is?

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#139

Post by rchaud »

ziddoap wrote: post #5

> a JetBrains employee said that reviews were removed because they mentioned issues that had since been solved That shouldn't be considered a valid reason to remove a review. I could maybe understand down-weighting reviews as they age and as issues are resolved, but as a potential buyer of some product/service/whatever, knowing that something was released with a bunch of issues (even if now solved) is a valuable sign…

Ive seen plenty of reviews in app stores where the vendor responds to negative reviews and confirms when the issue described in the review was fixed. Is JetBrains also removing positive reviews that mention features that have been discontinued?

Re: JetBrains defends removal of negative reviews for unpopular AI Assistant

#140

Post by rchaud »

serial_dev wrote: post #29
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #3

Not a good look. A better way would’ve been to add a response to the reviews (and notify the reviewers via eg email): “Hi, we’ve updated and these issues should be addressed now. Please take a look and let us know what you think!”

But that would be a lot of work and the damned user could reply or update their review that “it still doesn’t work and my review still stands”. If you control both the product and the platform, deleting negative reviews is much more convenient than actually resolving the issues.

Any company that thinks it's too costly to respond to paying customers better have a really good ads product or airtight enterprise licensing deals. Because that's the only type of revenue stream where you can get away with ignoring the user.
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