Google removes over 5M reviews from Play Store to improve TikTok rating

> I'm sure Google is planning to release a time machine which can manage the tracking of tasks that I just worked on last year.

> I can't tell if it's a "Google Timemachine" or a "Google Tracking App". If they release a "Time TimeMachine", this is a killer feature that will have a huge impact on how people interact with their time. I would be interested to know if this also means that you can just add a "Time TimeMachine" that will do some tracking on the number of meetings you have, or if I want to track your "time."

Google doesn't even have access to China so there's no financial motivation.

lol. It's almost as if the entire reason that China is not a backward stagnant economy is because they allowed people to own things, on their own. But here we'll just close our eyes and pretend that didn't happen.

Edit: Adding a thread which gives just one example among the hundreds. https://twitter.com/free_thinker/status/1262108843464486914?...

Meet and Whereby, on the other hand, require nothing but a modern browser.

Zoom has the worst UX of any of them. Here's what it looks like when I join a Zoom meeting:

Paste URL into browser (URL has company subdomain). Get redirected to a generic login page that asks how I want to log in, as if they have no way of knowing that my company has SSO enabled. Click SSO, get redirected to a new page asking me for my company's subdomain despite the fact that they already have it from the original URL. Get redirected to my company's SSO login and login. Redirected back, where they ask for my name, every time, even though it's on my profile. Finally, type in the meeting password and join.

It's literally awful. I can't think of a worse way to implement that flow. And I'm not installing their desktop app. Given their horrendous security track record, the fact that they shouldn't need a thick app to begin with, and that it has to run on my desktop because corporate VDI has terrible performance in video calls.

Ironically, I hear about this fact every time Youtube makes the news for ... you know ... moderating all of that.

I agree that PlayStore is doing it right by removing the reviews that are related to the service but not pertaining to the Android App itself, but then what counts as "using the app"? Seeing the videos created on TikTok counts as "using the app" or just the experience of the app itself? I would describe those reviews as "non-descriptive" than irrelevant, but yes they are very noisy. It's about the same as rating 4chan on trustpilot.

Also, if any country that has banned TikTok, like UAE or Indonesia, because of a different jurisdiction, then it's a valid criticism? If I go to a restaurant, and they only accept Chinese currency, then I would rate it as 1-star since I have only USD and the restaurant is not my preference.

One out of every fifty or so people in a country the size of India getting involved enough in an Internet fight to download and rate an Android app is pretty hard to believe.

10M is a huge number, even for a big country like India.

How about Wired? https://www.wired.com/story/an-old-malaria-drug-may-fight-co...

> Except for that video, which hadn’t come out yet, Rigano put all that together and got in touch with Todaro. “I essentially wrote the publication based on my interface with various Stanford researchers and others, and we developed this body of evidence and hardcore science,” Rigano says. “James, Dr. Todaro, was doing the best job, I thought, of anyone in the media, any doctor, any news outlet, anyone on Twitter, of covering coronavirus. I’d been following his research on other items, like decentralized computing, for several years.”

> Todaro, who got an MD from Columbia and is now a bitcoin investor, was interested enough to collaborate on the document. “I added stuff that pertained more to the medical side of things, and gave a more, I guess, clinical feel to it,” Todaro says. “Something that Big Pharma is not going to like—it’s widely available, it’s pretty cheap, and it’s something that at least a million people are already on. It’s really got a lot of the aspects of something that can be rolled out quickly if the right clinical data is there.”

> Todaro and Rigano together started talking to Raoult about the small study he was then preparing, and they also called a retired biochemist named Tom Broker. He was originally listed as the first author of the Google doc, his name followed by “(Stanford).” That’s where Broker got his PhD, in 1972, but Broker has been, for years, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His area of research is adenovirus and human papillomavirus, which have DNA as their genetic material, as opposed to the RNA inside coronaviruses. They’re pretty different.

> Broker says he wasn’t involved in producing the Google doc and would never advocate the use of a drug without formal trials. Todaro and Rigano have since removed his name from it, at Broker’s request. “I neither contributed to, wrote any part of, nor had knowledge of this google.com document. I have never conducted research on RNA virus pathogens … I have no professional credentials or authority to suggest or recommend clinical trials or practices,” Broker wrote in an email. “Apparently I was inserted as a ‘gratuitous’ author, a practice that I have always avoided over my 53-year career. Moreover, I have never engaged any part of social media, privately or professionally. All of my scientific publications are processed through peer review. I suggest that you communicate with one of the actual authors.”

> Asked about Broker’s statement, Todaro says that Broker just didn’t want to engage with the attention the idea and document were getting “I don’t personally know Tom Broker. My correspondence has been with Mr. Rigano,” Todaro says. “When we started getting inquiries from the press, my impression was, Mr. Broker got very overwhelmed by that.”

So, according to Wired, the "paper"'s first author says that its real authors put his name on the paper without his knowledge or consent, which is dishonest (it goes far beyond the usual questionable practice of "gratuitous author" insertion, which places your sponsor as the last author), and that he disagrees with what it says. The "paper" is obviously not the kind of thing a real professor would produce. The real authors say he's lying.

It seems clear to me who's lying here. Wired caught them lying about a lot of other things, too.