To Rate or Not to Rate

You know when you’re using an app, and a little box pops up like, "Hey! Ya wanna rate this free thing that I spent god-knows-how-many-hours making, this thing that you love and you use all the time. Can you just take a few seconds to rate it, so that, more people use it, and I feel good and maybe have a little bit more chance at making some money off this this I GAVE YOU FOR FREE, huh?"

And then they always give three options: Yes, Maybe Later, and No and Never Ask me Again.

I’ve never once rated an app, but I always click Maybe Later.

And I really do intend to do my part one day and give back to these people, by spending five seconds to rate their apps.

But I never have.

I think the real reason I click Maybe Later is because I don’t want the app maker to be mad at me. Like I somehow feel that they’re gonna know, and they’re gonna not like me, the makers of the app. So I click Maybe Later, as if to say, “No, yeah, I’ll do it later, I promise, buddy.”

My wife tells me that she always just clicks the "No, and don’t ever fucking ask me again" option, like a healthy person.

Because it's not as if I’m a better person than she is for clicking "Remind Me Later" instead of "Never Again." Neither of us has ever rated an app, so that’s a wash. I’m worse, really, because I keep stringing them along.

I actually have in my mind this fear that the programmers of the app might put in some code where if you say you never want to rate the app, they make it so that it starts working more shittily for you.

But I don’t really think that.

Even if the programmer just put in some code where if and when someone clicks the don’t ever ask me again option, he has a pop up box come up that says something mean, like, even if it just said, “Fine, ya jerk," - if that happened, I would feel very bad inside, off and on throughout that whole day. Even probably every time I opened up that app for the rest of my life, or, the rest of however long we use apps like this as a culture, I would remember and feel bad.

Loneliness

I think we can all agree that the saying should be updated to: “A watched iPhone never gets a text.”

And then you get that buzzing in your pocket, but it's not a text. It's just the NYTimes app doling out a little box of news. Nobody even died just some yada yada foreign country yada yada 12 dead 19 injured. Oh right I meant nobody famous died, so your brain barely scans the information before clicking the lock button and slipping your phone back into your pocket. At least if someone famous had died it'd be something to talk about with people, something you'd maybe even get to be the first to tell people who don't have news apps or pay any attention to Twitter. Another buzz and speak-of-the-devil it's a Twitter notification, but oh good lord it's that guy whose Twitter profile has been hacked sending another stupid DM inviting you to take surveys for money at home again. The thing about spam is that it's not that it's so annoying to get a meaningless tweet every other day; it's that sad moment when you go from, “Ooh! Someone tweeted at me!” to “Oh.”