{"schemaVersion":"1.0","type":"Article","types":["Article"],"slug":"i-wrote-that-my-extension-had-six-unasked-reviews-two-weeks-later-a-reader-asked-what-they-said-i-read-them-one-by-one-and-one-of-the-six-was-mine-a-counter-says-how-many-not-who-9a2dq","url":"https://zyvop.com/i-wrote-that-my-extension-had-six-unasked-reviews-two-weeks-later-a-reader-asked-what-they-said-i-read-them-one-by-one-and-one-of-the-six-was-mine-a-counter-says-how-many-not-who-9a2dq","title":"I wrote that my extension had six unasked reviews. Two weeks later a reader asked what they said, I read them one by one, and one of the six was mine. A counter says how many, not who","subtitle":null,"tldr":"Two weeks ago I published a post about a rule: I never ask anyone for a review, and the six reviews my extension has on the store arrived without a request.","keywords":[],"entities":["Mathieu Ades","Founder","ZyVOP"],"keyTakeaways":["Two weeks ago I published a post about a rule: I never ask anyone for a review, and the six reviews my extension has on the store arrived without a request.","The post was about what six unasked reviews can and cannot tell me.","The six came from the store's counter, which my metrics tool reads twice a day and writes into a file: reviews 6, rating 5.0."],"headings":["The sixth review","What the five say","Where the correction went","The rule","Disclosure"],"outboundLinks":[],"contentText":"Two weeks ago I published a post about a rule: I never ask anyone for a review, and the six reviews my extension has on the store arrived without a request. The post was about what six unasked reviews can and cannot tell me. The six came from the store's counter, which my metrics tool reads twice a day and writes into a file: reviews 6, rating 5.0. The sentence \"six unasked reviews\" was built on that line. Under the post, a reader asked a fair question fourteen days later: do the six mention a specific benefit, or are they general satisfaction? To answer I had to do something the post had not required: open the store page, switch the filter to all languages, and read the six texts. The sixth review Five were from users. The sixth was from the maker, under his own name, posted the week the extension was published. It is a real review by a real person who is also the person selling the thing, and the store shows it like the others. The counter counted it. My sentence had not. Nothing about \"six\" was wrong. The store said six, and there are six. What was wrong was the adjective. \"Unasked\" describes who wrote them and why, and a counter does not carry that information; it carries the number. I had attached a claim about the reviewers to a figure that only knew how many reviewers there were. The honest sentence was \"five unasked reviews and one from the maker\", and I could only have written it by reading the six, which the counter had spared me from doing. What the five say Since I had them open, I sorted them. Two describe a specific thing the extension does: one reader now sees the moment a bank advisor opens a message and then leaves it unanswered; another compares the result to a messaging app, where you know a message was received and read, and wonders why the mailbox does not offer this itself. The other three are general praise, practical, easy to install, useful, in three different wordings. Ease of installation comes up twice, and it is a real benefit, but it is not the benefit the extension was built for. So the answer to the reader was: two out of five name the benefit, and that is not a repeated signal, it is two people. The two who describe a use describe the same one, reading a message that was opened and not answered, and nobody describes anything the extension does not do. That is all five short texts can say, and I would rather say that than count \"useful\" as a benefit. Where the correction went Not into the post. I could have edited the sentence and moved on, and the ledger would have carried a note that the page had changed. Instead the correction is the first paragraph of my reply to the reader, in public, under the post that got it wrong: one of the six is mine, the post should have said five and one, and here is what the five say. The post stays as written, with the correction visible below it. A page that quietly stops being wrong tells a later reader nothing; a page with its correction attached tells them what was wrong and when it was found. The ledger line for the post carries the same note, so that the next text built on the reviews counter starts from six with one of them mine. The rule A counter tells me how many. Any word I put next to the number that describes the things counted, unsolicited, third party, spontaneous, independent, is a claim about the elements, and it has to come from reading the elements. Before a sentence like that goes into a text, the list behind the number gets opened. For six reviews that is two minutes. The version of me that wrote the first post had the two minutes and did not spend them, because the number was already on the line and the number was correct. It is the same shape as other mistakes in this ledger: a figure that is true, a sentence around it that is not, and no check that could tell the difference, because checks read figures. The only reader of the adjective is me. Disclosure I build BlueTicks for Gmail, a Chrome and Firefox extension that shows WhatsApp style ticks in your Gmail sent list, one tick sent and two blue ticks opened. It costs 4 dollars a year, and the free tier covers 30 emails a month. Everything above comes from distributing it in public and reading the six lines behind a number I had already quoted. You can find it at blueticks.io.","contentHash":"sha256:b32c3eadba413a4f3b937a7520b30c9426752f2bc6a1ad0482f85015254e50e2","authorName":"Mathieu Ades","authorUrl":"https://zyvop.com/author/mathieu","authorSameAs":["https://blueticks.io/"],"category":null,"tags":[],"audience":"Technical professionals and readers researching software development","tone":"Professional, founder perspective","readingTimeMinutes":4,"wordCount":799,"faqs":null,"primaryTopic":null,"publishedAt":"2026-09-21T22:17:16.336Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-21T22:17:16.336Z","canonicalUrl":"https://zyvop.com/i-wrote-that-my-extension-had-six-unasked-reviews-two-weeks-later-a-reader-asked-what-they-said-i-read-them-one-by-one-and-one-of-the-six-was-mine-a-counter-says-how-many-not-who-9a2dq"}