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.
> 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).
