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Comment by martinni | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure it’s that simple. They pissed off their most loyal and active customers. I doubt they’ll be back. What to say RH will not do this again in the future?

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They picked their company name evoking a certain moral ethos, and the first time their customers consciously acted on that ethos, they pulled the plug.

Whether you agree with that ethos or not, I think we can at least agree that RH lacks the courage of its convictions.

I think it's more accurate to call the name manipulative marketing and what we're seeing is just a company out to make money and save its ass.

Much like Facebook, RH’s users are not its customers. RH’s actual customers are no doubt thrilled with what the company has done.

And, much like Facebook, if you fail to deliver the product (customer data or customer trades) to your actual customer, you're still done. Their customers are surely thrilled by this Harakiri-maneuver.

You mean their investors?

Well, what are people going to do about it?

Look at Facebook and Google, they keep abusing their users, but without a good alternative, there’s very little to do about it.

Edit: eloquently put by a sibling comment, the issue isn’t having an alternative today, but what would happen when those other alternatives are faced with the same conflict of interest as RH is facing, and the answer is that they would probably react the same way, here’s the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947300

Thread on alternatives to Robinhood. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25946366

There numerous retail equity brokers that now offer free trades, mobile apps, and every other feature provided by RobinHood. Unlike Facebook, there is no network effect and unlike Google vs other search engines, different brokers are largely fungible.

There's alternatives to Robinhood though. Robinhood doesn't have the same social network effect as Facebook.

There are a lot of brokers though

This suffers from the illusion that there always is some "choice" or power average people have if a big entity pushes them around in the market.

>doubt they'll be back

Going where instead? Perhaps going to nowhere and not investing anymore, but if that's the alternative RH won't lose much on the margins vs if the "free market" wasn't really just a meme.

We live in a financial oligarchy. If we didn't, this blatant corruption with no recourse wouldn't be happening.

> Going where instead?

To another brokerage? This question doesn't make sense. RH isn't the only brokerage around, and there is a mass migration of people into other brokerages. Their app is currently at 1.0 stars.

If other brokers had the mass of users attempting this same trade, it would have been halted there as well. I guess time will tell.. we can't run the experiment over again.

But the fact RH would simply throw its customers away to appease hedge funds tells you something about who's in charge.

To be clear I'm not saying people won't "want" to go somewhere else that let's them trade how they want to trade (though the low friction and UX on RH itself needs to be re-implemented to equate a like for like substitution), and I agree they should and RH deserves to get ruined by users leaving en masse... I'm saying they won't be allowed to do so if another instance of this same dynamic occurs. Additionally, that there are calls for censorship of wsb, the future co-ordination on social media is also in question

I'm not sure. Plenty of brokers are still allowing trades. I can buy and sell on Vanguard in my brokerage account right now. If there's an issue with my trade I can call them, they show their phone number on the confirmation page.

They have some warnings amounting to "this thing is crazy, we'll do our best", but they haven't stopped me from trading. Other brokers are the same.

I think Robinhood cost themselves their business today. Anytime someone says "what broker should I use" the first answer is going to be "not Robinhood, they screwed everyone over" regardless of how true that statement is. I think the industry is about to come under fire too. Heads are going to roll on this one. Action across the board is widely supported by both sides of government. If it is even close to as bad as it looks, Wall Street firms just cost themselves much more than their short positions.

Schwab has a note that they're limiting volumme on specific stocks today. I agree with the point that any of the major brokers would have done the same, but I think that's more an indictment of all of these organizations than a defense of RH.

I'm just not sure about that until I see the volume and see that as a reason for them to not let me buy a security. They can have their systems go down... I mean obviously that's not ideal but that's something that could happen due to volume - but Robinhood didn't go down. Vanguard didn't go down. I can still buy via Vanguard right this second - what does the volume have to do with it?

All the pretty UX in the world doesn't mean a thing if there's a pretty message in the app saying that you are not allowed to do the thing you want to do.

There are plenty of brokers which are being migrated to right now that are not stoppping trades. European brokers not at all, and in the US Fidelity and Vanguard are still accepting trades (and handling the massive sign-up influx).

Furthermore, the fact that EU brokerages are not stopping trades is something to be considered, no?

They won’t cuz they r going bankrupt. Pull funds & watch the rest.

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