Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours | Hacker News Reader

Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours

play.google.com

707 pointsrvnx564 comments

The previous thread on this is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947697. For pointers to other vertices of this story graph, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25933543.

Large threads are paginated. If you want to see all the comments you'll need to click through the More links at the bottom, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25951390&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25951390&p=3

(and so on)

(This is a stub reply so I can collapse the various comments responding to this, so as not to distract too much from the topic at hand. (Sorry, non-JS users.))

Have you considered making the website actually show the comments instead of pinning yourself on every large post?

Hackernews has very few staff and most of them are busy with administration/moderation.

I agree kind of odd to see pinned posts by Dang but I have a feeling that's the best they can do with the resources at hand.

Given that they specifically introduced pagination to avoid issues caused by too-large single pages, probably yes. (tbh I would have passive-agressively made the "next" link 100px Comic Sans, but it's probably a good thing I'm not responsible for that)

Yes, but I don't want this temporary state to get too comfortable because it's not the desired solution:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24042165

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25065663

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25087113

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25383091

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25710620 (thanks tzs!)

"Every large post" is an exaggeration, of course—I probably do this on fewer than 10% of the paginated threads.

How were these not overall real reviews? If they can't prove otherwise, this just entrenches the idea that big money is vastly more powerful than small voices. I honestly don't see how if this trend continues how things will end well. It's not just about Robinhood, etc, it's deplatforming, using AWS, etc as a weapon against smaller voices. I can't see this ending well.

They'll just play themselves into regulation eventually. Once FTC comes after them the only people to blame for it are themselves.

Optimistic.

May be, but if "split up big tech" becomes a viable path to being elected things may change _suddenly_

Last year Elizabeth Warren called for Facebook to be split up. Facebook censored it.

So things may change suddenly, but in one of two directions:

1. big tech being split up

2. big tech exercising the control they have over politics, by controlling speech, to prevent being split up

The second option would of course be the final end of democracy in America.

We have democracy in America?

To some extent, at least.

They are clearly not afraid of regulators anymore

"Too big to fail" is a slippery slope and the Citizens United rulings certainly didn't help with accountability.

Me neither. This month is crazy with very visible examples of blatant, unethical overreach of prominent companies. This thing absolutely adds up in people's consciousness. Sure, it decays over time, but right now, it adds up faster.

Someone could become US president riding this public sentiment. Let's see if it decays in 4 years...

They could use a catchy slogan like "drain the swamp"...

I think there are a couple of other recent presidential hopefuls who centered their messages much more around reducing the structural power of billionaires and large corporations.

> who centered their messages much more around reducing the structural power of billionaires and large corporations.

The problem is that there is a segment of the American voters who believe that if the current billionaires and large corporations would quit screwing them, they would become the billionaires and owners of the large corporations. As such they are all for screwing over the current crop of billionaires, but don’t want long lasting reduction in the structural power of billionaires.

Sir, this is a site run by an investment fund, I'm afraid you've stepped a bit out of line there.

This platform is far from an impartial place. People need to remember the reason this site exists...

I've heard it said that Americans all think they are potential millionaires and billionaires that have temporarily hit a down patch. That's why democratic socialism will never fly here except for isolated programs.

Sir, how dare you discuss taxing money I haven't earned yet and will likely never earn in my lifetime.

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

John Steinbeck

Reminds me of an article I keep in my bookmarks from a long time ago, which is probably still true today: 39% of Americans think they are in the top 1% or that they will one day be [1]. They don't want to be mean to the rich because they think they are rich or will soon be among them.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-ho...

And further, nobody outside of the extreme of the extremists actually wants to eliminate the potential for achieving a "wealthy" status. People will always be able to achieve high levels of success. The argument is that we need to pick a point where amassing so much wealth can start to be deemed anti social and start to taper things off there. There is basically nothing you can buy with ten or eleven digits that you can't buy with nine, except entire corporations and countries and absolutely no individual needs that power or the prospect of that power to be fulfilled in life.

If you through Trump was bad, just wait until a competent version shows up

I expect pompeo or haley to feature prominently in that role in 2024 unless Trump himself screws things up for republicans by trying to make a comeback

Awful as Google is, I'd still trust it more than anything with Mercer's fingerprints on it. (Which is barely at all. But still.)

As for 2024 - it is obvious now that the only way the GOP can win another election is by dismantling democracy.

There is no chance whatsoever that the GOP can win again without wilfully disenfranchising tens of millions of voters. In spite of the bot mob on Twitter trying to create the impression there's some kind of enraged far right majority agitating for representation, the reality is the numbers just aren't there for a clean win.

So that is what is happening now. 2020 is the last chance for the far right, and they know that - which is why they intend to take the shot well before 2024.

>> As for 2024 - it is obvious now that the only way the GOP can win another election is by dismantling democracy.

I don't think that's true. There are plenty of moderates in the the swing sates that voted for Biden but would be more than willing to jump on the bandwagon for someone who is seen as a moderate conservative and making the right promises. The trick is getting that candidate through the primaries if the scene looks like 2016, where the hard hard right will gather around the one nut job, and the other 5 establishment republicans will be indistinguishable.

> The trick is getting that candidate through the primaries if the scene looks like 2016,

After Trumpists, tea partiers and evangelicals it will be interesting to see what happens next. The latter two groups seemed happy to align with trump despite not sharing their core values, maybe the trumpists will stick with whatever the next group is.

Pompeo is a clown who can't even Bangladesh or Ukraine and Haley is long in the tooth. The SD governor Noem has the superficial attractiveness and utter in(s)anity to capture the heart of US right-wingers though.

March 4th.

> March 4th.

I believe the context here is that Sovereign Citizens and some Q people believe that this is the date that Trump assumes a new term.

March 4 was (haven’t verified this myself) the original inauguration date. So says a podcast I listened to about conspiracy theories.

> could become US president riding this public sentiment

It already happened 4 years ago.

That was the sarcastic joke.

Most jokes are half-true here, sadly.

Given that 2021 is gearing up to become even weirder than 2020, it wouldn't surprise me if the next president was WallStreetBets' own /u/DeepFuckingValue...

I'd be down for asking someone from WallStreeBets to be my runningmate. Why DeepFuckingValue?

That user took a strong position in GME before this all went down, and is still holding.

I believe if you go back in the user's posting history, he has posted screenshots of having a position in the stock over more than the past year--before the pandemic even started.

He is the one that posted the initial GME due diligence (DD) last year. Started with 50k in stocks and options, was valued at 48 million yesterday and 33 today and been posting updates basically everyday recently [0]. He did cash out 13 million yesterday.

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/user/DeepFuckingValue

Things I should have done.

1. Bought bitcoin when it was worthless

2. Followed DFV's footsteps when I watched him go in GME options around a year ago.

I don't know whether he orchestrated this or it grew out organically, but he's essentially the Jesus of WSB now. Most of what he seems to be doing is holding lots of GME and posting day-by-day updates (he lost some 14 million USD on GME yesterday, but is still millions in the positive) - but that galvanizes the community.

> I don't know whether he orchestrated this or it grew out organically, but he's essentially the Jesus of WSB now.

None of his DD was actually related to GME being shorted. In fact he mentioned a few months ago that he wasn't betting on the squeeze would happen.

The last one who did was great at playing lip service but gave the wealthy & big banks a $1T payout via tax cut.

Hopefully this sentiment results in structural change instead.

Scary to think that after four years of solid market gains it could implode because of retail investors getting angry.

It's imploding because hedge funds are taking crazy risk on and then illegally trying to weasel their way out of the losses they have coming.

> it's deplatforming, using AWS as a weapon against smaller voices. I can't see this ending well.

This, so much - imagine you believe "they" stole the election, "they" got your favorite social media shut down (parler/gab/whatever), "they" blocked the buying of options, "they" then liquidated your position as the price predictably fail and you got margin called, you complained but "they" got your feedback deleted. Ouch.

I can't see this ending well at all. The executive will have to be extremely careful with what they will enact. The climate was already tense, but this is making it explosive.

I'd be extremely careful for all my 2021 forecast.

So this is conflating some very different circumstances.

Do you seriously believe the average person won't think like that?

It's breaking trust at the society level.

It can become extremely dangerous when a large percentage of the population don't believe there's a social contract anymore.

The point is that a widely perceived conflation will have material effects on the involved organizations and that the conflation will spread to new organizations with each new incident.

In all of these cases ‘They’ were within their rights.

So? That is supposed to make it okay in people’s minds? I kinda doubt it.

"They" also write the rules, so I can't see how anyone is going to be convinced by this.

Agreed, if you keep demonstrating that might makes right, eventually people will act on in.

I think it's a tough decision to make. In general I understand that Google would prevent review bombing, since it can very easily be abused by social media mobs or competitors. The point of reviews is to give a genuine idea of how people on average like a given app. Reviem bombing completely distorts that, whether it be 1-star or 5-star reviews.

But here it's a pretty huge app, and the bombing is motivated by a real issue the users are having, so I think I agree with you that it was not necessarily the right decision.

As always the real problem is that tech giants are opaque in their behaviour. If we had clear guidelines for what constitutes "review bombing" there wouldn't really be an issue I think.

Not really. Many of people are rightfully upset and want to leave a 1 star review. It would be extremely inappropriate if Google removed my review.

I think the app sucks if they can just prevent you from trading a stock and make you the bagholder in favor of large investors. Seems like a legitimate concern that hundred thousands of other people share - not some organized random prank. People are losing money as we speak.

It seems like maybe the solution is not to remove reviews, but weight them somehow. 100k reviews left in 2 days probably shouldn't have the same weight as 100k reviews left over 2 years.

Or a more sophisticated version of this would be to somehow cluster reviews based on the particular issue they are reporting.

Robinhood can kick people off, block trading certain stocks to help big players, etc. All ordinary people can do is leave a bad review and you want to take even that away. Why?

Because spam isn't helpful to other ordinary people browsing the store.

Or just you know let people express their views.

If people think the app is a good or bad experience they will say so.

Where did I suggest otherwise? My whole point was to let the reviews be, but figure out a way to make them useful. 100k reviews complaining about not being able to buy Gamestop is not useful.

right here:

>[reviews i dont like] probably shouldn't have the same weight as [reviews i do like].

You’re projecting. The comment didn’t say that. The intent of the commenter is being assumed, whether rightly or wrongly.

I think this is how Steam solved (or attempted to) with their store reviews. Now you can see two scores, the lifetime score and the recents score.

In an ideal situation the app should show the 4. lifetime stars and the 1. recent stars. A user will them immediately know something happened, and investigate on their own (whether the review bombing was for something they care about or not).

> 100k reviews left in 2 days probably shouldn't have the same weight as 100k reviews left over 2 years.

I'm not entirely sure I agree with this; let me offer another perspective and maybe you can talk through this with me and help me understand a little better. A review is an opportunity for a user to give their honest feedback to any prospective user and (incidentally) to the app developer(s), so a bunch of reviews bombing an app into oblivion has the potential to be wasteful and harmful (unauthentic negative ratings from competitors, like you mentioned). But on the other hand if Firefox mobile has average reviews and I don't leave any kind of review since I've been fairly satisfied with my experience with the app for the eight or so years I've been using android, then they release Firefox Daylight and completely ruin the experience for me, preventing me from doing things I've been able to do for years and fundamentally tanking the experience, should a five star review from 2017-18 be considered more relevant than my 2 star review from 2020? And the other thousands of 1 star reviews flooding in after the update? What if a company has a bad app, changes their process from waterfall to agile (sorry, had to inject a little humor here), overhauls their app, and gets a huge influx of positive reviews the same day as the release. Do the negative reviews left over time have more relevance than the positive reviews left after the update?

I'm not trying to take a position on what the right approach is, I'm hoping to understand a perspective that's different from mine :).

Wouldn't you see a similar rise in app store reviews though? Seems like that wasn't the case?

Clarification: It did not prevent you from selling your holdings (ie. did not make you a bag holder). It only prevented you from opening a new position.

It prevented people that bought on margin from selling during tomorrow’s short squeeze, since it auto-liquidated their positions.

At the same time as it auto-liquidated the positions, it blocked attempts to purchase the liquidated stock.

One of their major investors directly benefited from the resulting market distortion.

In this case you have a lot of people burned at the same time from the app failing to do the one thing they expected it to.

https://xkcd.com/937/

Which deplatformings do you specifically refer to? The concern over them just seems way too tribal at the moment to be considered in league with the more serious allegations against Robinhood and the funds involved - that is big money.

Wrt Parler specifically, I think a lot of the "solutions" (or sketches toward) on this site would quickly reveal that the optimal societal configuration is closer to what we have now than one would expect - with or without S230.

Also, the wording of "using AWS" is almost libelously in need of a citation - who is doing it, and how do they have any sway over a company that is both absolutely enormous and not particularly woke?

> Which deplatformings do you specifically refer to?

President (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram), White House, Parler (Google Play, Apple, AWS), MyPillow guy, anyone who utters the phrase "stop the steal" on Facebook, Kyle Rittenhouse (Facebook, GoFundMe, Discover)

Wow, it's almost like private companies don't want to be seen supporting terrible people who have done terrible things, such as damage a democracy by incompetence and malice. Or encouraged and emboldened extremists cumulating in an attempt to actually harm the leaders of a country, or illegally obtain a gun, shot several people, then was seen associating with extremists who regularly call for and perpetrate violence.

Well those private companies wouldn't be seen as "supporting" anybody, if they behaved with any level of consistency and transparency. It is a problem of their own making, with every virtue signal further compounding expectations. I suspect that the majority of people you hate probably have phone numbers and receive mail, but I don't believe that AT&T and UPS "support" them - because those companies don't pull these stupid stunts. Debanking is starting to get normalized... and the new liberal battle cry is "private companies!"

Yes, that's why deplatforming happens.

These centralized app stores are part of this problem

The internet has been going poorly for awhile. I don’t see how we’ll get off this track where the large crush and silence the small. I’m not sold on IPFS, GunDB, Zeronet, ect... My guess is federated XMPP or RSS might be a few of the only vestiges of resilient organization. Even Matrix has signalled they’ll begin looking into deplatforming. https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...

Sad times in cyberspace.

I read your Matrix link and it's not top-down deplatforming, it's user-driven moderation:

> What if we had a standard way to let users themselves build up and share their own views of whether other users, messages, rooms, servers etc. are obnoxious or not? What if you could visualise and choose which filters to apply to your view of Matrix?

The closest to actual deplatforming is:

> Admins running servers in particular jurisdictions then have the option to enforce whatever rules they need on their servers

But honestly, in a federated system I always assumed the server owners could do that. As long as it's not mandated from on high by the Matrix team, anyone can host whatever they want by setting up their own server.

Big money? What big money exactly? Do you really think Google care about RH and its money? They do it to prevent organized activities of rating manipulation. The RH case might be justified but Google cannot be the judge. If tomorrow the corner store across the street receives 100K reviews in 1 hour, Google would respond in a similar way.

I don't see any overlap between Google's executive board and Robinhood, but it's a small world among power players at that level. Someone could have called in a favor (or been trying to curry one).

Without more information, it's hard to say whether this was a good faith move by Google, reflexive algorithmic moderation, or another example of American extractionalism.

Please, some common sense. Google is one of the wealthist and powerful companies in the world. RH is one app out of millions in their play store. No one at Google is stupid enough to do RH a favor. It's not the first time nor the last time they do something like like this. Their tos doesn't allow rating manipulation, which clearly happened here. They don't care if it justified or not.

All the insane conspiracy theories floating around, by people who mostly have no idea how trading/margin works, that this is just mean ol’ hedge funds trying to screw the little guy... I’m suddenly afraid of Trump 2.0, except he or she is gonna be a lot more competent and brutal. Jan 6 was just the warmup.

There is so much wrath, envy, and greed out there, and so much willingness to believe whatever fits one’s preconceived notions of how the world works.

But the giant hedge funds and billionaires aren't corrupt at all and we should all just believe them?

Get real, most economic theory is all nonsense to cover for corruption and insider trading. Everyone can see how bad the economic inequality is getting, greed is mainly from the rich side, not from the so-called "conspiracy theorists"

Exactly! Today I saw a clip at the top of Reddit of a CNBC clip that was clearly manipulated to generate outrage, but only one person out of thousands even mentioned it in the comments

All of this very impressive, community, unpredictable, sentiment driven market has proven is that even the platform those cowboys and girls are trading on are owned.

The claw's in deep.

Completely unmoderated reviews would be awful, which suggests moderation is necessary. Moderation requires judgment, and different people have different ideas about what good judgment looks like. Your question made me think about what a "real review" is. Should the person have used the app for more than a certain period of time? Do they need to have taken certain actions (make an account?) Different folks will draw lines in different places because reviews are just opinions, and there are no real credentials for having an opinion. I don't see a way to resolve this with a centralized model.

Federated/distributed systems where the network is itself the filter seem more promising to me, even though they tend to come at the expense of usability.

why do scores need to be simple? why not simply graph satisfaction over time and allow for demarcations like number of hours used. trying to apply a roger ebert scoring system to products and services that are ephemeral and ever-changing is largely meaningless. whether review bombing is legitimate or not, it at least always has a cause and that cause should be considered highly relevant purchasing information.

Totally agree...ratings could be quite sophisticated. In the end, I suspect that sophisticated scoring system would still need to draw lines that some will disagree with, and we'd be back where we are now.

Sophisticated scoring might also bring common critiques, like ratings being biased or opaque (or just confusing). I recall Netflix had a issue when they made their star rating a prediction of what you would rate it (based on your previous viewing habits). It confused a lot of people who thought it was simply the average star rating. They since switched to percent-match as a result, and dropped star-reviews in favor of thumbs-up/thumbs-down.

Come to think of it, your suggestion may lead to something like percent-match for apps...though I suspect rating apps along dimensions the way Netflix does TV/movies may be tricky. Maybe different dimensions for different categories in the app store?

I'm still intrigued by a distributed approach that filters opinion through the sieve of the social network...I think it has more promise than centralized rating systems that attract abuse.

I don't agree at all. I want to be able to rate an app that made it impossible to sign up with 1 star. Or that required access to my camera even though the app has nothing to do with taking photos or images. So, no time in but the app deserves IMO 1 star and potential customers should be notified to stay far away from the app

As for breaking apart reviews into categories that also has its problem. Zagat used to rate restaurants in 5 categories and it ended up requiring people to lie if they wanted to convey the message "do not go here".

Meanwhile in the UK, the 'Robinhood equivalent', 'Trading 212' also is taking a hit with the instant 1 star reviews it has: [0]

I'm expecting that Google will do the same here.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.avuscapita...

And the news pits us against one another because God forbid we all get along and work together. That would be the real threat.

Could a solution to this be a 3rd political party that unites people together somehow? Instead of fighting between democrats and republicans all the time.

OK. Is your third political party pro gun or anti gun? I need to know before I can commit... see the problem yet? We’ve been divided with wedge issues.

> this just entrenches the idea that big money is vastly more powerful than small voices.

An “idea”? It’s like saying there is an entrenched idea that the Earth goes around the Sun.

The political class tried everything in the book to divide this nation. And in just one day, at least among the “retarded”, there is unity. No wonder they are all coming out of the woodwork to claim support for the retards. They are worried.

> How were these not overall real reviews? If they can't prove otherwise, this just entrenches the idea that big money is vastly more powerful than small voices.

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

I mean, "this user never even downloaded this app" and "it got 100000% more reviews today than any other day" is probably a decent enough heuristic for removing fake reviews.

I've been using Android for over a decade now I believe. Have only reviewed a handful of apps and generally been a good citizen. I left a thoughtful one star review today and it was deleted. I'm not going to lie, it irks me.

It feels like picking votes in a democracy. An interesting concept.

customer reviews aren't really a 'democracy'. They're supposed to be authentic and reflect the overall quality of the app to the general user.

A horde of outraged users bombarding the app even though most people won't care about this particular event distorts the rating comparable to disappointed TV viewers bombing imdb. It ruins the utility for everyone else.

I think the review is meant to reflect the entire product, not just the app. That includes robinhood's service, they're not separate. And robinhood passed a lot of people off by restricting the buying of certain stock. The backlash is warranted

Sadly for me a lot of the apps I've made I'm pretty happy with are filled with reviews that basically say "Sally in customer service was mean, 1 star".

That is part of the customer experience. If Google / Apple really wanted to, they could give more than one dimenion to score on. For example, a five star rating for app quality, fun, and customer service.

That they don't shouldn't preclude customers from rating the entire experience.

Yeap I think that is the feature I would like. I still think it’s fine they rate the whole thing by the way, just sad for me!

That's how reviews are supposed to function. If the users are outraged at the app for what they feel was wrong behavior by the app and it's associated service, they are entitled to it. Just as I am entitled to leave a glowing review if the issue does not affect me.

Every product has a defect rate and outraged customers are the most likely to post reviews. Therefore a product is likely to have an overrepresented proportion of negative reviews. This is a tricky problem to correct for. I'm thinking about this more in terms of Amazon reviews, where they perhaps factor in the rate of returns when deciding what and how many reviews to delete.

that just means the reviews skew lower, not that they need to be 'corrected for'...

If a good product has 1K 'bad reviews', and a crap product has 10K 'bad reviews' - the system it working.

Anything else is just gaming the system to inflate review scores across the board.

When I shop for products on Amazon the problem is such that more or less all reviews are negative. In that case it doesn't matter if it's 1k or 10k, they simply drown out the positive/neutral reviews, even though I'm pretty safe to ignore the "this product was DOA" reviews. The review incentive structure is fundamentally broken.

eh - you can actually read all the reviews by rating...

if you feel only 3 star reviews are valuable, amazon lets you read just the 3 star reviews. If stuff is being 'drowned out' its because your trying to read all 500 pages of reviews?

To me, a much bigger problem is the fact that reviews on amazon are for totally different products then whats being sold (Sellers 'recycle' pages and change the product being sold - allowing them to keep the reviews and ratings)

So basically - I have to read the reviews 'most recent' first anyway..

> Every product has a defect rate and outraged customers are the most likely to post reviews. Therefore a product is likely to have an overrepresented proportion of negative reviews.

If I buy a product or a service, and it is defective or not what what was promised or not upto mark, I have the right to complain about it. Shutting down my valid complains because it would create an overrepresented proportion of negative reviews is downright wrong.

It's "wrong" in the sense that you go unheard but "right" in the sense that I can make a more accurate assessment of the product. I care more about the latter and so does the sales platform.

The way this is fixed is by surveying customers and asking for reviews. Being involved in a customer service software Saas, I learned that for most companies, 80%+ of the interactions/transactions with customers are positive. But as you say, most people won’t leave a review - unless you ask them and make it easy for them to leave it. It also helps if you ask them to review a specific person (so they feel like they are helping someone).

What Google Play has done is not the right way to fix the ratio of positive to negative reviews, especially given the issue at hand. It also should be RH the one fixing its own reviews by addressing the problem with its user base.

Supposing YouTube looked great, but they turned off the ability to watch videos, it'd also get a 1 star review from me.

chances are if you were leaving a review on the app on today of all possible days, and a one star one at that, it was most likely a knee jerk reaction to the company policy change (which they were basically forced to do) and not the app, and not a thoughtful one.

The Google Play Store isn't exactly known for "thoughtful" reviews. The GPS review system is so horribly gamed by app devs that I just ignore it.

You'd do better to phrase this as a question. If you are willing to assume bad faith on an impression alone people will likely do the same for you, i just did.

Phrasing as a question means you aren't making the assumption and gives op a chance to make a good faith response, which is usually more constructive.

It’s an app for trading stocks. Suddenly I can’t use it to trade stocks. One star is warranted.

As always, there’s a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/937/

First time I see that one! Incredibly relevant, 5 stars

This seems a lot like giving the Amazon app one star because something was out of stock.

But nothing was "out of stock". They just decided you can't buy?

In effect, it was. The stock was out there, but RH didn't have the cash in the right account to move it so you could buy it. If Amazon doesn't let me buy black socks for one day, it doesn't mean there are no black socks anywhere in the world.

That’s absolutely not what they told me in the email they sent me. Amazon doesn’t have my money in a sweep account. One star.

Say you went to a restaurant on a day when their lettuce had salmonella and a bunch of people got sick and angry and then left 1* reviews on Yelp. Would you take them all down for the same reason?

This energetic response from so many huge players even outside of WS have really elevated this meme stock saga to a monumental art piece.

Another interesting aspect is the back-and-forward. Reddit throttled and seem to have restored the sub. Discord reversed the ban. FB & Google jumped in.

Not to mention all the WS action, obviously. Financial press started with an emphatically anti-WSB position but public opinion and regular media went sharply in the other direction. I suspect tomorrow's press will be quite different.

WSB nutters believe they have withstood an day of coordinated market manipulation efforts. They're very pumped for round 2. Meanwhile, it seems like brokers, clearing houses, market makers and the markets are getting ready to reopen trading again.

The whole thing has become symbolic, and that might mean even more demand tomorrow.

Did you use the app?

Honest question: why does Google care here? They don't really have a stake in the GME situation, with no short or long positions (I'm assuming). They aren't that connected to Wall Street companies. Why protect Robinhood at all?

Money. These people are fixing to lose to much, they'll pay their way out any way they can while they still can.

I get RH might be paying money to cleanup play store reviews, but how much is enough to justify the negative PR ?

There is another angle though - may be RH or some higher power is threatening to sue Google if they didn't help cleanup based on their own terms, which might have clause of active sabotage - I am sure they claim this is one such event.

That's not how these things work. Google is interested in the status quo. So much turmoil around digital platforms angering the owner class is bad for their business, more tech regulation etc. They don't want any drama, just fun and consumption.

RH didn't pay anything. Google knows what to do. The interests are way deeper than some pocket change moving around...

> They aren't that connected to Wall Street companies.

Lol. Sure they aren't.

Maybe, but Google are in a different league to these funds.

Google the corporation? Sure.

Many of the managers and workers at Google? Quite likely have a stake in what goes down on Wall Street.

That's more plausible but still relatively unlikely if you consider both how Google usually operate and who'd have clearance to pull the trigger if this is what is being suggested.

On balance, I really think this is just an automated system that's being conservative. Would you be in any way surprised that Google would have such a thing looking for big impulses in activity?

I doubt it. I'm at Facebook not Google but most of us employees are supporting the WSB side of this.

Most of the employees are not executives.

*Alphabet

They don't like their platform being manipulated by organized downvoting. Not rocket science.

Manipulated?

I just gave a 1-star review on the iOS app store and am currently pulling all my money out of my RH account, because I don't like how RH is behaving.

People all thinking something is shit is not manipulation, its just collective agreement.

To play the Devil's advocate here, my personal intuition is that App reviews should be for how the apps perform, and shouldn't be used as proxy for reviewing those businesses. If the app is buggy or broken or whatever, it makes sense to give a low rating. I am not sure it makes equal sense if people suddenly realize they don't like the company who has made the app.

That's a fair point, and I agree with you – I hate it when reviews don't give me (the reader) an accurate picture of the experience I'll have with this app. Two problems though:

1. That's not how people treat reviews (people will leave a positive review if they love the business but the app is crap), so it's misleading to only enforce such an ideal here, with negative reviews.

2. In this case, the business effectively is the app, at least from the user's perspective. The app wouldn't let me even look at GME/AMC today, much less buy it. That's not what I want from a stock trading app, because it's an annoying experience that leaves a sour taste in my mouth, so 1-star it is.

What if an app functions perfectly, but doesn't do what it promises? That's what seems to be happening here.

If it is not letting you sell when you want to sell that’s a pretty shitty performance for a trading app. This is different from a subjective dislike of the parent company.

xkcd #937. It's all great if the app isn't buggy, but if it doesn't do what it's advertised to do it deserves even more bad reviews.

The functionality of the App and the policies and choices of the business are intrinsically tied. In this case their choice directly affected the functionality of the App: I was unable to buy or even view certain stocks. In my opinion that is, without a doubt, App functionality that should be subject to user review and rating.

It's one thing for the company to make choices that people disagree with but don't affect the actual functionality of the App. This could be environmental policies, partnering with a controversial government, using tax loopholes, etc. People going on brigades to review bomb an App for these types of issues are what should be protected against. Mass shifts in public opinion due to actual changes in how the App behaves should not be protected against.

I'm in the process of doing something similar. If you are as incensed as I am you might want to consider leaving a small amount of money < 1 USD in your account and opening an unused credit card with them.

Wait what does this do?

Presumably puts some burden on them? Like they have to maintain your credit card, review it once in a while, etc?

What does "manipulation" mean here, and why is it bad? What does "organized" mean here? I personally left a 1-star review detailing why I think the app deserves it before I heard anything about the review bombing. If a significant portion of it is "organized", why is that bad? You're making many large assumptions, not to mention framing them antagonistically ("not rocket science").

This is brigading - people were not reviewing the app (which the app rating is supposed to measure), but retaliating against a (valid) slight from Robinhood. Seen in that light, the recent mass voting is noise.

Whats the difference between the app and the service the app provides from the perspective of a user of the app?

There are multiple ways to access the Robinhood service. The service itself may be great (e.g. via website), but the app terrible (crashes, bad UI, slow, etc).

In this case their "slight" directly affected the functionality of the App: I was unable to buy or even view certain stocks. To me that is clearly App functionality that should be subject to user review and rating.

Mass shifts in public opinion due to actual changes in how the App behaves is not brigading nor retaliation and should not be protected against.

This reminds me of the "review bombing" debacles that have plagued Steam over recent years. Valve implemented a system to detect these patterns and discard the ratings. Valve had no particular stake in the games being "bombed", but they do have a stake in the trust people have in their platform. People want to know if a game is truly good or bad and not have to wonder if it was the victim of some kind of vendetta.

At the time no one strongly protested the move by Valve, but in the context of this situation with Google, Robinhood, and WSB it seems to have hit a particular nerve.

I don't think they remove the reviews outright though. They detect it, label it, and offer both a "recent reviews" and "all-time reviews", as well as a visual graph to show you the trend.

A far better approach than just removing the reviews outright if you ask me.

There is a huge difference. Review bombs are by people who usually have not played the game/app but post negative reviews on mass because of something usually unrelated to the game itself. In the case of Robinhood they are written by people upset that they have been monetarily screwed by the app. There were millions of people in WSB, 100,000 negitive reviews is only a fraction of that.

I don't think there is any appreciable difference, at least with the Steam example, as to review it you have to have owned it and refunds are neither easy or plentiful. Besides they were usually bombed for things relating to game login changes or DRM changes not on a whim like free apps on Google Play often are (which Robinhood is).

That's not to say Robinhood didn't deserve poor reviews or Steam hiding it is good but it definitely has seemed to strike more of a nerve with Robinhood even though both were very similar.

Given a lot of the comments I've seen today, I think a lot of people are upset they have been monetarily screwed, but do not actually understand the reason why they got screwed, and are just repeating stuff they've heard, regardless of its truth.

Either way, this could've been an automated system kicking in, which probably cannot tell between legitimate and "illegitimate" review bombing.

> In the case of Robinhood they are written by people upset that they have been monetarily screwed by the app.

Are they? This feels identical to a few people organically getting mad and then people bandwagoning.

Valve did that for games that had fake reviews though. Getting your margin calls discarded out of hand and preventing buys on cash accounts is not the same as a game getting poor reviews because they had a policatally charged character.

They're not targeting fake reviews on Steam. They're targeting "off-topic reviews". ie. review bombing for topics outside of usual gameplay.

That might be inclusion of a pervasive anti-cheat, a poor comment made by a developer, or most recently a movie tie-in that included an offensive line.

These reviews are not removed but they stop contributing to the overall review score.

You think Google, the 5th largest company in the world (by mkt cap), has no skin in the game when it comes maintaining the finance industry status quo?

Reasons Google would not want the financial status quo:

1. It tends to retard technical progress.

2. They have to make deals with entrenched incumbents to do finance.

3. There's nothing stopping a hedge fund manipulating Alphabet's stock.

Even if they do want to preserve the financial status quo, it's pretty difficult to see where the review score of a retail broker app fits in with that.

On the other hand avoiding review bombing is a Google Play store business objective, doing it in a half assed reactive way with an algorithm is Google's style, and of course it's also Google's style to not care about customer service nearly enough to wade into a debate about whether a pile on related to genuine upset with an app company's policy is really review bombing

I don't think this is about the specific news or Robinhood's specific actions. More likely Google have a policy (or a habit) of removing reviews that don't look "organic", or reviews that seem driven by news or agenda. App developers will more be more likely to publish on your platform if their reviews are less likely to be unfairly mobbed or something.

Just guessing, obviously, and I'm not sure how the contours of such a policy would work. Clearly organic bad reviews will often be correlated with each other, and with negative news.

> More likely Google have a policy (or a habit)

Or automated system

Google doesn't want fake reviews on the play store. Its as simple as that. Google is removing these probably because they look like fake reviews, and don't care enough to spend time and resources investigating it.

How do you define "fake review"? People are not happy with a company and its app and they are "punishing" the company, what is the purpose of reviews if not this?

But it's a free market and Google can do whatever they want lol. Don't you dare to say a bad word about them.

Exactly, how do you define "fake review"? Google sees 100K+ negative reviews coming in for one app on one day. What do you think they're going to do? Take 'em all down and call it a day. I really doubt that there is some incredibly corrupt culture in Google Play reviews or something like some are suggesting. I really the product owners just want to go home for the day/turn off the computer and eat dinner, just like everybody else that has a job.

How is that not fraud though? They are advertising a manipulated review score. The 1 stars aren't bots, they are people. Would it be legal for e.g. yelp to remove a string of bad reviews stemming from a catering company giving a wedding food poisoning?

I'm not saying I condone what happened. I just see people claiming corruption, and I personally doubt that. I think its more along the form of "lets remove these reviews for now and analyze them tomorrow"

Corruption is a tricky subject. Pawns of a dictatorship, a mafia or any hierarchical corrupt structure... They might not be aware of what's actually going on but that doesn't change the fact that the structure is corrupt. Whatever caused this, Google's guidelines, its business practices, its investor relations, is corrupt.

So, if prosecution or police receives too many (above average) complaints about something on a single day, they should just trash all of them and go home, is that what you are saying?

No, those entities are subject to laws. Google and friends have transcended the mundane world of us mere mortals.

No. I never said that Google taking the reviews down is warranted or they are in the right or something. I'm just saying I don't think it's a malicious attack on users. And app store reviews of a stock trading app and the consensus of the general public on their police are completely different social scenarios, so comparing them is aimless.

If you're using an AI, I assume they see that the comments coming in all follow an extremely similar format or come from suspicious IP addresses or come in at suspicious time intervals and so on. There are plenty of indicators that a review might be a bot.

That would be wrong but believable. I read some of the reviews, they did look very similar in ways beyond describing the same problems.

But I'm good with assuming malice, it seems like every company that takes action right now is unlikely to be doing it coincidentally. Maybe Google is doing it because of money somehow, hopefully it's an actual mistake that they'll fix. I suspect the former.

A fake review would be a review left by someone who is not a real user or customer. Thats almost impossible for google to work out but they would make it an aim to get as close as possible.

You want to try to avoid the mob jumping in on the reviews of something they never used because of some bad news.

Let X be the number of angry people who were affected by Robinhood's decision and let Y be the number of negative reviews left today, do you really think Y is greater than X here? If an app does a bad thing, it gets negative reviews. If an app does a really really bad thing, it gets a lot of negative reviews. What's so weird about that? Where is the "mob"?

Unsure.

What I do know is that Google doesn't remove reviews for just anyone. They don't remove Play Store reviews and they do not remove Google Local reviews. Even if an app or a company is birdgaded due to bad news that is someone's opinion.

Hopefully, Google can 1) Send out something explaining their action and 2) Provide regular folks the ability to have reviews removed.

They don't like that apps on their store are being review bombed. That's really all it is.

My theory is something simpler: Play Store has anti-review-bombing mechanism. It simply kicks in in this case.

Google makes a lot of money from app developers. Perhaps they decided that the cost to them of angering app users by deleting negative reviews is less bad than the cost of app developers leaving their platform because Google won't protect their reputation (whether the negative ratings were deserved or not). App developers can watch this and rest easy that Google has their back in this (even if they don't on other things).

Google Play Store is a monopoly. Developers literally can't leave unless they want their android installs to decline by 99%.

Does Robinhood run on Google Cloud? If they aren’t this could be a move to try to get them to consider switching.

Keep in mind AWS is about to take on Twitter account and they took out Parler, an up and coming competitor overnight.

Jan 28 2020 (14:05): 196,808 reviews (2.x star rating) https://web.archive.org/web/20210128140536/https://play.goog...

Now: 180,500 reviews (4 star rating) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.robinhood....

It seems like they just deleted all of today's ratings.

You can see it in the screenshot: https://ibb.co/PwLD7Sh

This page doesn't exist

I think it's becoming crystal clear Americans live in an oligarchy, not a democracy.

> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

From 2014: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

There is some kind of revolution coming. The big catalysts are things like censorship on social media and wall st changing the rules on the retail investors.

But actions like these only mount the problems. Why on earth would google remove these reviews? What Robinhood has done this week is an extremely reviewable act.

The Google play store managers and/or their bosses probably have their hands deep in it. It'd be interesting to see what a real investigation into this produces.

I have little to no interest in any stock market, but everything that's happening around r/wallstreetbets right now is nothing short of fascinating. Almost seems like a domino effect, revealing step by step how much control these companies have, at least beyond the tech sphere[1], and how interconnected they are.

I mean, not that I'm really surprised by this happening with Google[2], but still I didn't expect them to get involved; don't see what they have to gain by this other than sharing on the bad publicity. Wonder if Apple will step in too.

Hopefully these events will actually lead into more adoption of decentralized protocols and platforms (and more support for open hardware development, maybe), and I'm starting to wonder if this week will go into the history books.

[1]: I mean to say that I know that many in the tech sector were already aware of it. But everyone at large was just kind of okay with it, so this is revelatory from that perspective. Well, hopefully it is.

[2]: In fact, this was probably caused by the surge in activity triggering one of their (in)famously intransigent algorithms, which never seem to stop increasing in number.

Things are often less intentionally sinister than they look. In this case I believe they're following the policy of removing a mob like review attack.

However the effect is still undesired where a group of unhappy users can't express their dissatisfaction through the review system

OK what? What the f%#$ is going on here?!!

What triggered Alphabet to suddenly get involved? I'm assuming that these reviews didn't appear recently, suddenly or something.

Discord shuts down WallStreetBets and reddit throttle them.. both for hate speech. Suddenly, simultaneously and coincidentally during their maneuver.

The CEO of the NASDAQ rushes to a camera calling for SEC scrutiny and tightening regulation, wearing a look of disbelief on her own face. Financial press have a meltdown in the opposite direction of regular reporters. No laws seem to have been broken.

Now google happen to be doing something with the RH app? WTF! This whole thing is saucier than soup.

All that’s missing is a dishonest Trump tweet telling everyone what to think about the situation.

Lol. I hadn't even thought of him. He's probably deep in twitter withdrawal atm. All this action. All the other famous billionaires tweeting.

> What triggered Alphabet to suddenly get involved? I'm assuming that these reviews didn't appear recently, suddenly or something.

They did appear recently. The latest pre-today copy of the page at archive.org [1] had it at 166469 reviews (average a tad over 4 stars). That was from 2020-11-17.

The next copy there was at 14:06 today (2021-01-28) [2]. It's up to 196808 reviews (average 2.5 stars). They captured it several mores times today. Here's a table.

  14:06  196808
  17:17  295104
  18:24  306315
  19:17  327577
  20:22  330648
  21:02  319501
  21:36  246084
  22:25  202305

and they have two captures from tomorrow:

  00:24  180490
  02:23  178221

If we play it safe and assume that all the reviews as of 14:06 today were old reviews, there was a minimum of 133840 reviews today, which would have been 40% of the total reviews. More realistically, if we go with about 170k old reviews, it's more like 160k reviews today representing almost 50% of all reviews.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201117224019/https://play.goog...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20201117224019/https://play.goog...

I left a 1-star rating this morning. Just checked a minute ago and it appeared as if I had not left a rating. I quickly corrected this.

Can confirm. This also happened to me.

Google should go ahead and adopt a new slogan “We are evil, so let’s let the world know it.”

I think they did just that when they retired the slogan “don’t be evil”.

True, but they haven’t come out and stated it explicitly yet. Now’s the time ... don’t miss this opportunity, Google.

For anyone looking for a proof:

Before: https://web.archive.org/web/20210128202220/https://play.goog...

Now: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.robinhood....

It's a big club.

And you ain't in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5dBZDSSky0

Well, that was incredibly quick. Big money talks FAST.

Or, just possibly, a hundred thousand one star reviews in one day trigger some sort of automated spam system and not everything is the work of shadowy big financial institutes?

If that's the case, then the spam system is at fault and needs fixing. Actual users should be able to leave actual reviews about the app's actual behavior without being flagged as spam. As long as they're not violating other terms like vulgarity or whatever, those reviews are valid and removing them means the system is doing the wrong thing.

Question: I gave a 1 star review on AppStore and when looking at it again it appears like I didnt give a review at all? Can someone else confirm- is this the same for others? So you just cant leave a 1 star review (it says thanks for feedback though)

Is it not market manipulation when you can control (a mojority in this case) buyers actions ? My belief is they wouldn't take action blocking trades without their intermediary influencing.. It makes no difference to them otherwise.

So who is RH's intermediary?

I couldn't find from a brief google search but I am curious how and why this occurred when it looks like such a bad move for RH. Especially with rumours of them wanting to move for an IPO themselves.

1) Something happened here, either they didn't have capacity tech wise, which is a legit concern. - I haven't heard that being the reason yet.

2) Their intermediary blocked their trades, and so they got cucked, can't think of a better expression.

3) Someone told them to slow that squeeze down - This is probably the most UNLIKELY, but the one that everyone wants to jump to.

We might find out why, but really in the end it doesn't matter.. WSB and co has proven, the market is as strong as the confidence people give it.

Lies propogate when money is involved, shorting +20% is considered risk, +100%.. I'm sorry but I personally don't have sympathy. Infact, I appreciate when it's caled out.

I'd rather not bail out any more banks for bad practices that might be legal purely because they haven't had a light shone on them.

I do worry about the losers in this all though, and it's not the people with money. If you're in this deep, rent money deep, get out. It's a good fight, but there is no unsung hero reward on this one. If you have money, pump that to pluto idk.

Moderating obvious brigading is standard practice. Huge influxes of retaliatory negative reviews in reaction to external events aren't considered very genuine. I don't think Robinhood is getting any special treatment from Google here.

It’s not an external event.

What exactly is "ungenuine" about giving a negative review to a stock-trading app because it did not let you trade stock?

Probably an automated system, detecting reviews by people who haven't actually used the app. Google is basically an AI-run company at this point.

Doesn't abstain them from taking responsibility. What if there were bunch of legit bad reviews that got deleted?

.. responsibility? Google? I don't see how this would hurt their advertisers.

Responsibility for what, exactly? They don't have a responsibility to publish any particular review in the store. They're free to include/exclude/weight the data they receive to give you star ratings for apps in any way they'd like. Vote clumps like this one tend to make star ratings less trustworthy as a measure of the true quality of an app, so I'd expect an app store operator to discount them.

responsibility for maintaining the integrity of app reviews

Fair enough. There's a tension here between integrity and usefulness that is interesting, though. If I were to put myself into their shoes I'd be hesitant to commit to a specific public-facing policy for filtering ratings and reviews, though.

And the 130,000 employees all work on new Messengers?

New video chat apps

it's 50/50 new messengers and sunsetting the old messengers

oof this hits too close to the mark

upvoted :)

I don't think you meant this sarcastically but it's probably closer to reality than you think.

They certainly aren't paying full-time employees to go through tedious stuff like that. That's what contractors are for!

And on removing features from Google Maps.

You mean adding more features? Takes a legit 10s for everything to load now before you can do anything in the app.

Nightski's comment suggests strongly that this is an incorrect guess.

Why? Nightski doesn't say whether they actually used the app.

I use the app daily and it was still deleted

If you sort by `Newest` and `1-Star`, I am seeing pages (paginated) and pages of reviews. What am I missing?

Same thing happened for tiktok in India. When people are posting reviews that call out actual grievances suddenly these are "fake reviews". But everybody justifies such actions by Google/Apple saying they have a right to allow/disallow whatever they want on their platform, no obligation at all.

First they came for us, and you didn't speak out. Now they are coming for you.

100k 1-star reviews sounds like bot spam FWIW

also the link provides no proof

It might look like it from 100,000 foot view, however a bottom's up approach would show that there are millions, if not tens of millions, of people quite aware of Robinhood's shenanigans and are pissed off about it - enough to leave a review.

There are over 5 million subscribers to /r/wallstreetbets as of right now. The majority of them joined this week. 2% of them voting on the app doesn't sound like bot spam to me.

Reddit is not exactly known for preventing spam account creation...

The original (now banned) discord had >300k members alone.

Discord have an hard limit of 250 000 users so that's a lie.

The discord group is back up, you can see how many members it has yourself - 378,303

https://discord.com/invite/wallstreetbets

That's incorrect. Server owners can request limit increases. The official replacement server already has ~380k members.

https://i.imgur.com/EdREGic.png

WSB has over 5 million subscribers right now (up 1 million from yesterday alone) and some threads get over 100,000 comments on a single thread. I don't find it hard to believe that a 100k Android users got angry enough with Robinhood to leave a negative review.

Legit reviews and bot spam both sound like plausible explanations. I'm sure Google has the server logs to figure that out with reasonable certainty, but unfortunately we don't.

Well, the one I left was legit.

I have no screenshot, but:

Right now, the link shows 4 stars and 180,526 reviews. Few hours ago, when I became aware that /r/wallstreetbets are talking about Robing Hood's app, I took a look at that same page out of curiosity. It clocked around 250,000 reviews, with overall rating of 1 star.

Here is the screenshot: https://ibb.co/PwLD7Sh

I can tell you I saw it at ~300k reviews and a 1* rating today.

Verge has confirmed: https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22255245/google-deleting-...

Might have something to do with them preventing their users from buying today to save their hedge fund masters, no?

Something like 50% of RH users had $GME positions.

100k is probably on the low side of angry users right now...

Yesterday at 290 000+ reviews : https://web.archive.org/web/20210128171659/https://play.goog...

four hours ago at 180K : https://web.archive.org/web/20210129002353/https://play.goog...

And now at 178K reviews https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.robinhood....

With more than 100k review in a day, Google must detected them as fake reviews by default.

It's still sitting at 4.7 stars on the iOS app store as well, with few 1 star reviews visible. I wonder if they have a queue that reviews have to sit in before they start showing up publicly.

Huh, Apple hasn’t a review from today either, but no story on that.

Looks like you found that! Go and let everyone know!

Apple reporting is significantly delayed, always has been, seems like 24-48 hours. They seem to to do more batching than realtime with reporting. Tomorrow may be more interesting, or not, if they choose to delete activity from today.

"Incorrect opinion, Citizen Unit 263-29-2942."

For what its worth I edited my previous 4 star review to a 1 star today and it seems to still be active. But rating the app as 1 star is not enough. We need to take our money out of Robinhood even if we end up having to pay a few dollars per trade. Also I have not made any plays on gme or the other stocks and I would not recommend anyone else do so but this type of market manipulation is unacceptable and needs to be punished.

So, if a free-to-use app suddenly becomes pay-to-use and all users lose their access to their data unless they pay (similar to an app getting malware but in a legal way), and then those users review with 1 stars...Google will remove those reviews?

This is dangerous. I remember some cases where an app suddenly changes owner and adds ads and other unwanted features. What happened in those other cases?

I always thought of app reviews as being reviews of the applications... not of the companies or services behind them. So it's kind of jarring for me to see the app taking a hit when it's the service people have a complaint about. The app didn't misbehave, right? It's not like a different app interfacing with Robinhood would've worked any better. So while I don't particularly like what they're doing, I think I can understand it if this is their motivation for removing these reviews.

Edit:

Never mind—it turns out Google literally says "Your reviews should reflect the experience you've had with the content or service you're reviewing."... apparently they do want you to review the service... or at least at some point they thought they did. Pretty confusing to see how they're dealing with this now, if they truly want that.

https://play.google.com/about/comment-posting-policy/

For this app, it is inseparable from the services it provides, they are one and the same.

Edit: imagine reviewing the Instagram app, but doing it only as a review of the app part and not of the service too? If Instagram is likely to lose your data, or otherwise misbehave, and its not the app code but the service itself, it still has a big impact on the app experience. I can't think of a single app review that's only based on the app code, everything is also about what the app lets you do, the services attached to it.

How though? The website behaved the same way. By that logic it would be impossible to review the website? And it's not like it's hard to imagine an app with a worse interface in front of the same service. A worse app for the service should receive a lower rating, right?

You can't use the app for anything except this one service. If you're not reviewing the service itself at the same time, what's the point of reviewing the app?

You're reviewing how good of a UX the app has for the underlying service, as I see it. Because it's very easy to imagine a great stock broker with an awful UX. By your logic all variations of Facebook Messenger (like Lite, etc.) should receive the same rating? Surely that doesn't make sense?

Doesn't make sense to review only UX part of the app or any other part of the app. For me the review should include the whole experience the app gives.

Yes I would expect Facebook Messenger app review to include the facebook messenger service experience.

Would you say the same thing if it was a 3rd party developer writing the app? Someone like yourself who's just trying to put a better app in front of Robinhood? Would they deserve blame for this too?

Yes of course.

>Someone like yourself who's just trying to put a better app in front of Robinhood?

Yes I would expect some user to complaint, the service is part of the app experience.

That seems so unreasonable to me. What could that person's app have possibly done better to receive a better rating?! Do you blame people who are doing the best any human can do in their position when they have absolutely no control over anything?

For me its not unreasonable.

>What could that person's app have possibly done better to receive a better rating?!

You can try find workaround, change to alternative service, build your own service (I'm not implying that its easy), or just simply accept that.

Yes there will always be something you can't control but doesn't mean its an excuse to get away.

That's so terrible. But thanks for sharing. I guess now I see how we end up driving good people out of positions of power and leave worse ones to fill their vacuums.

So you want the app has good rating even though the underlying service is bad that cause the whole experience to be bad ?

Thats so terrible.

> Do you blame people who are doing the best any human can do in their position when they have absolutely no control over anything?

If someone advertises a service but cannot provide that service due to ineptitude, mendacity, or bad luck, then they will be almost certainly be judged on that regardless of their efforts. Their efforts may or may not be taken in to account but this is not school, we are adults, and as such we are all judged based on performance before all other considerations.

For those who wish it to be otherwise then that's fine, just don't charge.

You're confusing what I'm saying. I'm not talking about grading on effort, I'm talking about grading on achievement. Nobody was talking about how much effort went into the app. While I would guess it might've been a lot, I have no clue and I don't care. The question was, do you grade them on what they achieved, or on what someone else achieved on something else that they had no influence over, but which they clearly had no choice but to depend on... regardless of how much effort did or didn't go into their work.

In this case, RH's actions negatively impacted the service which their users depend on. The app is an interface for that service. It's common for app reviews to be influenced by the quality of the backend service.

If Spotify purged many popular musicians from their library, I'd expect app reviews to reflect that even if the app itself is still fine on a technical level.

The app exists to provide you a service. You only have the app installed at all to use the service. When the service sucks 1 star is entirely reasonable. It's not a review of the developers effort. It's a review of using Robinhood with the app. If people hate it, that's their right, surely?

Good on Google for making it utterly clear how dishonest they are. They're facing new monopoly regulation, how does this buy them political favor?

You're correct. But it's also useless without the service provider, and the store specifically asked me if the app was good at trading stocks, linking bank accounts, tracking stocks.

If we stick with your perspective, no, it's not. It's a pointless app without the service it consumes. And today the service frustrated a bunch of its core users.

A good rating on the play store serves as advertising. It helps the app creator, and in this case the service provider, gain customers and make money. They probably should be penalized heavily for the way their users experienced service degradations today that made the application useless.

> But it's also useless without the service provider, and the store specifically asked me if the app was good at trading stocks, linking bank accounts, tracking stocks.

This confirms what I said though. You tell the store "this app isn't good at trading stocks" because "GME was made unavailable for trading"? For that logic to follow, it would mean the app misled you or confused you when GME wasn't available for trading. But that's obviously not what happened here. Blaming it on the app for this seems very much like blaming your bus driver because the transit company changed the schedule.

We aren't saying "this app isn't good at trading stocks" We're saying this company is not good at trading stocks. The review section should be an honest forum for the app and the service the company can provide through the app. Do you really expect the common person to point out if the app made followed the fundamentals of UI/UX design? The review is to express users' experience, which can involve poor app design and/or poor service.

> Do you really expect the common person to point out if the app made followed the fundamentals of UI/UX design?

What? No. I expect them to say "it looked like my GME orders were submitted, but I don't see them going through", or things like that, if such problems existed. You don't need to be a UX expert to review a poor UX. But when the store asks you "is this app good at trading stocks" and you say "no it's awful, and I'm also not saying this app isn't good at trading stocks", you're not answering the question they're asking.

A user can't be expected to know where the line is between "working as intended" and "misbehaving". A user can't be expected to know what is the fault of the app's implementation, and what is the fault of "the service" behind the app. Even at their most restrained, users review the user experience.

> A user can't be expected to know where the line is between "working as intended" and "misbehaving".

Sure they can. RH even blasted out messages through the app telling people exactly what is going on, and what they can and cannot do. Nothing I'm aware of confusing about it, certainly nothing that caused people to give this rating. I don't think people are dumb enough to not understand the difference between "this app is broken" and "I was forbidden from trading GME" with all the indications that were shown on the UI.

Speaking for myself I perceive the app rating as a conglomeration of possible perceptions. On what that rating might reflect. You state it should reflect the apps functionality, but I feel that an App that doesn't do what I want, intuitively, is not a good app. Some rate it high because the font is so lovely. I think in the end a one dimensional numbers falls short to describe the plethora of thoughts that go into creating a rating, that can be given on a whim.

It would be easy to seperate the reviews for providers and apps. Google doesn't do that.

Same for Amazon. Very often bad reviews are for the seller or the packaging or the time for delivery. Then there are discussions from people who tell other people to review the product not the seller and on it goes. Amazon could have split - with ML I think they still could - the reviews and the seller in a way that satisfies users (seller reviews are much harder to find and not accessible at the point of product review).

Yeah, this is basically the same situation. I confess this has always been perplexing for me too. I don't understand how people can give poor ratings to a seller when they don't like a product. It's clear as day to me what each review is intended for, but apparently not to everyone?

Here I thought the entire point of the App was to trade stocks and yet you couldn't do exactly that. A bad rating is warranted.

Users review products/services based on "Did it fill my needs". They really don't care if it was useless because the app sucked, or the company sucked. They just leave a review saying "this sucked". If you're lucky, they leave enough info. about why it sucked, to see if it matters to you.

The playstore isn't consumer reports :-)

"I always thought of app reviews as being reviews of the applications... not of the companies or services behind them."

I stopped reading there since you are obviously misinformed.

Nothing new to see here, they did similar things in the past for other apps too.

Did anyone actually think that online ratings represent anything meaningful?

It's numbers in a database controlled by the seller who makes more money if the numbers are better. My insight that it's all fake came when I tried to purchase a baby carrier on Amazon and found a product with hundreds of 5 star reviews, but all the pictures were teenagers with their plush toys...

Especially Google Play ratings - they're not at all meaningful.

Some Google stooges must have thought ratings are meaningful or else they wouldn't have erased the Robinhood app's ratings.

"Its a big club and you ain't in it" - George Carlin

Politicians + Government Lackeys, Media Hacks + Corrupt Wall Street + Think Tanks + 'not for profits'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKUaqFzZLxU

I like the guy but I disagree with his fatalism. If we managed as human beings to curtail what was considered normal for millennia, to wit slave trade, we can also make things way better.

We need to start by making it illegal to be a billionaire.

> We need to start by making it illegal to be a billionaire.

I’m listening. What does this law look like?

Taxes. I think most human beings can survive with 100 millions of dollars of wealth (it's more than one can spend in multiple lifetimes). Anything over that can just be taxed.

The problem of letting any private entities get that rich is they start to take control of everything.

One such example is The East India Company having at one point a bigger private army than the British Army[0].

As things go we will soon be at that point again.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_armies

> Anything over that can just be taxed.

Except the politicians will take that extra tax money and use it to bail out banks and wall street and spend it on shit that no one needs and impose policies that no one cares about and continue the corruption cycle, only now with a lot more money than they had before. We should trust the government a lot less, not more, with our hard earned dollars.

Greed is part of the human nature, and people in the government are no exception.

So you’re not making it illegal to be a billionaire, you’re just taking it in the form of raising revenue for the government.

Except government revenue serves a purpose: paying for government services and salaries. What do you do with the surplus cash?

What about when someone does not have a billion dollars in cash, but has billions in assets?

Flesh this out for me please.

Someone on /r/latestagecapitalism pointed out if you seized everyone's excess billions above $1B, you could end world hunger for 216 years, end climate change by 2030, etc etc.

Around 7.5 billion people on earth would probably agree to those benefits.

Someone should have pointed out that they were wrongly assuming people could eat paper.

So then the billionaires could easily part from said paper.

Of course they could, but it wouldn’t help people so why bother?

Sounds like something /r/latestagecapitalism would say and this wouldn’t be the first time they were wrong. Show me the work.

2% annual wealth tax on wealth over 200M.

70% top marginal tax rate on incoming over $10M in a year.

Then it wouldn't be illegal to be a billionaire, but it would be much harder, and would mean you were constantly contributing a significant amount back to society if you're able to maintain that level of wealth.

How would this work for someone who is a billionaire by means of illiquid assets like stock in the company they founded?

They will have to sell to pay taxes.

And slowly lose control over their business? What if they aren't publicly traded?

They could also issue dividends from the company to share-holders.

This wouldn't weakened control of their ownership interests, but it would reduce the overall size of the company itself.

They would have a couple of options:

They could sell stock—maintaining the total size of the company but losing some control over it, in order to pay taxes.

Alternatively, they could reduce the size of the company by having the company issue dividends on the stock to shareholders, in an amount enough to cover taxes.

> contributing a significant amount back to society

You misspelled “the oligarchs who run the government” as “society”

You have thought this through more.

1. How would you conduct this assessment? 2. Now that you have figured out the legality of your position, why is this moral to do?

> How would you conduct this assessment?

The same way the IRS conducts income assessments. Some additional forms that you have to fill out declaring your wealth at tax-time.

For the vast majority of people you could add a form on the IRS-1040 that is a single check box.

"Check this box if you have less than $100,000,000 in total assets". If you have more than $100,000,000 in assets, then you have to fill out an additional schedule(s) detailing your assets.

If your assets are over $200,000,000 then you're taxed on your assets that exceed that amount.

> Now that you have figured out the legality of your position

I actually am not 100% convinced of the legality of the wealth tax. I think we've figured out the practicalities of it. I think it may be an open question as to whether a wealth tax is presently constitutional.

I don't think it's obviously unconstitutional, but I also don't think it's obviously constitutional.

> why is this moral to do?

I'll play if you will. First, you explain the moral position of allowing people to starve, and to die of the elements when others have more money than they could ever spend in their lifetime.

Once you explain the morality of a national with the resources such as ours allowing people to die in the elements, then I'll go ahead and take a pass at the morality of the wealth tax.

Which is to say: I think it is immoral not to have such a tax.

Final edit to add: IGNORE THIS COMMENT!

Nothing to see here, but I can't delete this post. tl;dr I got excited because I couldn't see the RH app returned in a play store search, even though I could see the app via a direct link. A commenter has pointed out that this is because the app isn't available where I am, in the UK. Sorry for the fuss.

----------------------------------------

I've just posted the comment below in a dupe of this post [0], but am keen to see whether anyone else can reproduce my result:

I just searched for the app so that I could see what reviews remained, using my desktop browser pointed at: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=robinhood%20trading&c...

Top results include Trading 212, Webull, eToro and others - and the page goes on for quite a while (Coinbase, Bamboo, etc) before eventually ending up with kids' cartoon Robin Hood games.

The Robinhood app itself hasn't been displayed. Can anyone else confirm this?

Edit to add: Just tried searching using the suggestion [1] that came up after I typed the word "robinhood" into the query box - which was "robinhood trading app uk" - and chose that. I thought that perhaps there was some georestricted stuff going on. But no: I scrolled to the end and the Robinhood app was not listed.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/search?q=robinhood%20trading%2...

---

Further edit to add that I followed the link given in this post, which took me to the RH app page with its (remaining) reviews, and then copied the title of the app as given "Robinhood - Investment & Trading, Commission-free", and pasted it into the search box.

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=Robinhood%20-%20Inves...

Again, that search returned lots of other apps, but not the Robinhood one. Any ideas why?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25951215

Some apps are region-locked. It doesn't show up in my search either, but if I manually go to its play store page [0] it states "This app is not available for your device". Blocking apps you can't use from search isn't that unexpected.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.robinhood....

Yes, you are right. It was pointed out to me elsewhere that it's not available in the UK, which is where I am. I was searching via desktop, and didn't get the "not available for your device" message on the app's page, but did get an "add to wishlist".

So, thanks once again. No mystery here after all :-(

Just keep doing it, next week, next month... how many bailouts is Google going to give them?

We must be watching a budget 1 star movie. In the first half of the movie, the action takes place in a casino. Players have figured how to win the rigged game and the casino is losing big money. Managers have to drop the pretense they follow the rules.

Big Tech is really begging for some regulation. They are really likely to get it soon too.

I am a real user of the app and I can confirm my review was reviewed without my consent.

I wonder if the next phase of the internet is for groups of heck, 100000, maybe 1M or even 100M people to organize to take things down permanently. Maybe right now it's like baby steps, but what happens in a year?

The WSB debacle gained momentum because everyone thought they were going to get rich in the process.

I think people are going to become very disillusioned when they realize how much of the information posted to WSB was misinformation. WSB removes posts and comments that don't toe the line that everyone needs to buy and hold GME. Meanwhile, the only way to profit from this trade is to sell at exactly the right time, before everyone else does.

There will also be a lot of frustration and disappointment when various hedge funds announce how they made record profits on the Gamestop frenzy. Some will suffer, of course, but others will make billions.

Finally, living in a world where frenzied crowds conspire to take out services based on shared misunderstandings will not make for great outcomes.

> WSB removes posts and comments that don't toe the line that everyone needs to buy and hold GME

WSB allows both sides of the conversation, but because users have become especially dogmatic recently, any opinion that runs counter to the narrative gets downvoted.

I just checked and they removed my review I wrote earlier today. I am not a bot.

I stopped using Robinhood before all this non-sense because the interface sucks (and also, many stocks aren't available on RH).

The proper response from Google was really simple. The app is a fraud, so remove it from the play store and ban the developer.

shame on google

have they acknowledged this? how can they justify it? are we should it's google and not robinhood somehow? IIRC, the iOS App Store allows developers some control over how ratings are presented (i.e. by allowing them the option to reset ratings when uploading a new version)

Yeah the title is speculated, should be more factual: “robinhood’s Google store ratings recovered”

If the reviews were reset, there wouldn’t be 180k+ reviews sitting there right now...

It's not possible for an app publisher to delete reviews.

However, in the Google Play Console, as an app publisher you can flag comments as against the Google ToS, about 100 per day maximum and then the reviews go through moderation at Google.

Here, it's more like a bulk deletion was done (certainly manual action) and I doubt it's just one single moderator taking action to delete 100k+ reviews.

Rotten Tomatoes has pulled the same shenanigans before when a "this was supposed to be popular!" movie ended up with poor ratings from mere users. If anything, the lack of kickback to them has only emboldened moves like this one.

RobinHood has aspirations of an IPO. I think it's fair to say they've lost the confidence of their audience up to 90%.

I honestly don't think it was their call. But highlights the demand for a decentralised market... Honestly, the people have spoken.

Google is a company and not obligated to let anybody post any kind of review on their platform. This is a non-issue. Whoever doesn't like can build their own play store, android os, and smartphone. No need to whine.

How is this possible? Can Robinhood just ask Google to remove 1 star reviews??

If someone predicted 10 years ago what Big Tech did in the last years, they would have been labeled conspiracy theorist.

They're just ahead of the curve.

Modern surveillance capitalism is far beyond the wildest fever dreams of 90s shortwave radio conspiracy nuts.

agreed, at least jack-booted thugs are visible to those they oppress

If anyone predicted Trump becoming president 10 years ago, they would've been labelled a lunatic.

Reality is stranger than the fiction we all live within, because fiction has the constraints of being something we can comprehend and live with. It has to be redeeming and hopeful, reality doesn't.

Doc: Tell me, Future Boy, who's President of the United States in 1985?

Marty: Ronald Reagan.

Doc: Ronald Reagan? The actor? [rolls his eyes] Ha! Then who's vice-president, Jerry Lewis?

Well, Reagan became president back in 1981, which wasn't much different. If anything he was just an actor (before getting into politics, which is even less qualification that a salesman/real estate guy.

And, aside from spending on BS like "Star Wars" and escalating things with USSR, Reagan also established the neoliberal greedy nightmare we live in since.

> If anything he was just an actor

Well, he was also a union big shot for over two decades, eventually elected as president of SAG.

Then, he was governor of California for nearly a decade.

So, quite a bit more qualification than "just an actor."

>Then, he was governor of California for nearly a decade.

Yeah, so like Schwarzenegger.

You could make that argument for every President since Woodrow Wilson at least...

> If anything he was just an actor

He had a longer political career (and one more directly relevant to being the chief executive of a government) than Obama before each became president.

Kind of like right now, how Simpsons predicted a global recession after President Trump's term is being jokingly brushed off even as it seems like we are in a bubble.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S

A throwaway joke in a Simpsons episode does not "predict" a recession to any degree of reasonableness.

just like Trump's presidency right?

Seriously, reason from first principles. The incentives are the outcome. It was predicted in mainstream media (granted as a pessimistic joke):

https://www.joe.ie/movies-tv/simpsons-writer-reveals-how-he-...

R. Stallman did talk about all of that.

You are both correct. Richard Stallmann was always treated a bit like a conspiracy theorist.

However, there was no conspiracy. This is just the result of human greed at a massive scale.

If anyone thought that big tech wouldn't do this 10 years ago they were naive.

Big is they key word. Big everything does the same thing. Which is why we need to not let anything get big.

Things are slowly shifting and decentralizing with gab, parler(when they return). Now maybe new startups in the Robinhood space.

You can draw that line of reasoning all the way back to the dawn of agriculture.

Note that I'm not necessarily disagreeing.

It's the same if you talk about it today.

I think you're right but I also think the recent Parler/Q stuff is relatively small fry. It was bad already, twitter finally getting the bottle to ban someone who'd been clearly violating their rules for half a decade is pretty minor.

Where did you live 10 years ago that wasn't run by corporate greed and corruption, or were you just too young to remember it?

If anything, things are better now than they were 10 years ago, and things were even worse 10 years before that. One reason that things are getting better is that more people are paying attention, which makes that fun paradox where a bunch of people who are new to this whole thing perceive the world as getting worse.

Very curious what specifically makes you see things as less corrupt or people as paying more attention. The CARES Act was as bad as anything passed during the financial crisis and sailed through Congress with nary a word of objection or media scrutiny.

Is there a specific metric you're thinking of? My understanding is that income inequality is at an all-time high, and I'd be very surprised if it were worse 10 and 20 years ago.

Examples: https://equitablegrowth.org/eight-graphs-that-tell-the-story...

I was mostly speaking in terms of corporate crime/greed and the general public's willingness to let it slide, which is admittedly a pretty hard thing to quantify.

But why do you believe that it was worse 10-20 years ago? How can you tell?

> If anything, things are better now than they were 10 years ago, and things were even worse 10 years before that

While things are truly better in certain aspects, the percentage of people relying on these companies now - as opposed to then - makes up for the less bad-ness.

I think the general attitude was not that these people are conspiracy theorists and making these things up but that there response would be something like "Why does it matter, how does it affect me?" and the answer would have been some theoretical bad thing that the average person can't imagine happening to themselves. Now its happening which makes it real for people.

"Morality police" was once a 80's or 90's trope or meme against the religious right coming from the left. Now, those with interest in policing morality from a leftward slant and those with special interests at other entrenched mega-corps have both found nearly unlimited use of puppet strings at SV firms to wield their power with frightening alacrity.

I wish I could find it, but 10 years ago, probably longer now, there was a prescient video where there turned out to be only 4 tech companies left. Something like amazgooglesoft or something. The narrator had a deep voice and I think it was funded by a media company.

Edit: Found it through the keywords, "old prediction video where amazon microsoft google buy everything" lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUHBPuHS-7s&feature=emb_titl...

When all the tech companies merge, they will in turn be bought by Taco Bell.

A short squeeze is how Taco Bell won the fast food wars

Maybe a 30 Rock bit (or just coincidence):

GE. Proud to be one of America’s 6 companies

Cyberpunk is a thing since 80s, FYI.

Yeah, I was. Multiple times. On this site in particular.

Stallman predicted this for decades and was labeled as such until Edward Snowden came about and showed the evidence right in our faces.

As usual, Big Tech strikes again with a lesser role this time. It won't be the last until some 'action' is done to keep them in check.

People may have taken him more seriously if he didn't eat the crud off the bottom of his own bare foot and sexually harass female colleagues. Dude undermined his own message by being a complete creep.

>People may have taken him more seriously if he didn't eat the crud off the bottom of his own bare foot and sexually harass female colleagues. Dude undermined his own message by being a complete creep.

The fact that he remained in his position for so long and the degree to which people melted down and swore bloody vengeance against the "cancel culture mob" when he finally faced any consequences at all demonstrates how little his behavior actually mattered within the free software community.

If anything has undermined Stallman's message, it's been the failure of free software to adequately compete in terms of quality and UX to proprietary offerings in the marketplace. Their answer to Photoshop is Gimp, FFS.

It seems to me these are not really genuine app reviews.

If I look at the reviews for a Smart TV companion app I want to see review of the app, not complaints about the picture quality on the TV.

Private company, they can do what they want. Or suddenly no?

Just because a company can does what it wants doesn't mean there can't be vocal discourse denouncing that opinion

The sudden reversal is just amusing.

What reversal? If you're referring to a different scenario, then you should explain why they are comparable, instead of sarcastically declaring that they are.

I meant the general tone of this forum in regards to private companies doing what they want. Last week it was parler being deplatformed and most here were happy with that as the free market was doing what it wants. Now the free market is doing the same and people are pissed.

Unless you think that what robinhood did violated their contract, but I doubt the court will see it that way.

Few more cases of this, and finally people will understand that this argument is bullshit for platforms this size. Quantity has its own quality, as the saying goes.

It's possible to have one opinion on one case and a different opinion on a different case without any contradiction. Implying that that is untrue is unrealistic.

Doesn't mean they can lie about the rating of a product.

I have used Robinhood in the past for a short period of time. Wouldn't have known my review was removed if i didn't see this article...

They had over 300k rates and 1 star for solid reasons

I get very different review counts when I reload this page. I think people are greatly overestimating the consistency of this number.

HN has lost its mind. Everything is suddenly a conspiracy against the noble individual investor. Story after story voted up to the front page with minimal relevance.

I mean, just think: were there really 100k legitimate Robinhood accounts that were blocked from an HME buy to justify a bad review? No. This is spam. It's just spam. People are angry, and this is a tool. And it's treated by Google exactly the way any other review spam would be. There's no conspiracy here.

The anger is justified.

> were there really 100k legitimate Robinhood accounts that were blocked from an HME buy to justify a bad review?

According to Motherboard, the majority of RH accounts hold GME.

There's also over 5 million subscribers to /r/wallstreetbets as we speak (most of them from this week). What percentage of those do you think would be "eligible" (according to your own criteria) to leave a legitimate review?

> According to Motherboard, the majority of RH accounts hold GME.

They retracted that later.

"Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that 56 percent of Robinhood users hold GME stock. This is incorrect, based on a misreading of a statistic on Robinhood. Motherboard regrets the error."

See the bottom of:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ak7y/robinhood-stops-users...

They haven't provided an updated value. However, it's not hard to believe a significant chunk of Robin Hood users owned some GME today.

Thank you! Would correct if I could still edit.

A honest review is not spam.

You don’t need a GME position to think less of Robinhood after today

How is that spam? I find the information that the app developer suddenly crippled the service promised during installation to be very useful.

>I mean, just think: were there really 100k legitimate Robinhood accounts that were blocked from an HME buy to justify a bad review?

With out a doubt. Robinhood has 13 million users according to their own filing with the SEC. WallStreetBets has 5 million subscribers. An overlap of 100k between those two groups sure seems likely to me.

If 100,000 people are each leaving one review about their experience, presumably related to Robinhood's change earlier today to limit certain actions, how does that qualify as spam? Is it because it happened within a short timeframe? I'm sincerely interested in what qualifies as spam in this case given that these are organic, possibly non-automated reviews that map 1-to-1 to a specific user who has installed (and presumably used) the app.

This reminds me of the Trump 2016 campaign and the Bitcoin 2017 bubble. It's the same avalanche of bullshit social media strike tactics.

The accounts were more likely blocked from a sell.

Google is censoring reviews as we speak. If you refresh the page you can see the review count climb up, and then fall down.

I left a one star this morning. I deleted it and added a new one with different text string

Nothing like big technology companies deciding whose voice should be heard..

I guess everyone will have to resubmit their 1-stars :/

I recall not too long ago people were balking at the idea.

HN isn't immune either. Try posting any criticism of Github's half assed apology to the Jewish engineer who simply said "watch out for Nazis" on Capitol Hill.

Try bringing up the anti-semitic memes being posted inside Github's work environment allegedly.

I guarantee you will be downvoted and flagged. Not only that but all of your other comments in your history will be downvoted.

Go ahead, try it. I've repeatedly experienced this and I don't care if I get banned now because it would confirm our greatest fears that not too long ago were brushed off as "partisan conspiracy theory".

The silver lining is that Fediverse is gaining more and more support until one day it becomes a serious contender.

Silicon Valley is awesome but it’s a puppet factory

Something similar happened after Four Seasons Total Landscaping hosted an impromptu Trump press conference. Within hours there were thousands of 1-star reviews on their Google business page, and then a day or so later all of the recent reviews were gone and they were back to a few dozen old ones.

This case is different since Robinhood did something that materially affects its users. And I guess a lot of these reviews must be legitimate? But I wonder if there's some switch that flips if a huge influx of reviews starts pouring in.

Just post the neg review again...

There is no hope for average Joe

Wow. WSB == Hacker News?

Screw the FAANG gang...they are not lawmakers and shouldn't behave like one.

This is insane

Just a reminder to de-Google your life too. There are some decent alternatives out there, for example Nextcloud for storage and open-source Linux phones like the PinePhone and Librem 5. As for video platforms, Library is looking promising, as well as other peer networks like PeerTube and BitChute. Alternatives are out there!

Bare in mind, Google have pulled these kinds of stunts before. Just recently they removed a bunch of negative comments and dislikes from Biden's presidential speech - whatever your political position, I think nobody should be above criticism.

Vote with your feet!

Why do people keep needing proof that big money runs everything.

Yeah, really. Can anyone point to counter-examples?

There are a few -- Glassdoor, and Google reviews let you post bad reviews of businesses even if they have tons of money. That's not to say I disagree that big money runs things, just that it's not 100%.

Entirely anecdote, but I've heard of companies asking all their employees to give them good Glassdoor reviews.

There were stories here on HN (might dig them up) about how Glassdoor blackmails companies with "it would be a shame if your good reputation was ruined by some random bad reviews, eh?" and removes bad reviews for companies that hand over the dough :)

This is definitely a thing. The startup I used to work for did this a ton before they were acquired.

They would even request it during all-staff meetings.

IIRC from recent HN threads, Glassdoor is considered to be completely gamed, and the company is in on it.

See e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24789865.

I don't know why anyone needs to be told this, at this point, but EVERY review system is being gamed. You can't trust ANY of them.

The article is about Google wiping reviews, and I’ve worked for a company that asked employees to leave good reviews on Glassdoor

Theranos HR posted one good review for every negative one to even out the score.

the tone on glassdoor has shifted a lot since they discovered HR departments and recruiters as their main (only?) client base.

> ... It's also free to claim your employer account. After that, Glassdoor costs $249 to $600 per month depending on how many jobs you want to post and what specific features you want to add (again, the premium service costs more). -- (probably better sources this is just the top google result) https://fitsmallbusiness.com/glassdoor-vs-indeed/

Glassdoor is gamed. I've spoken to some multiple HR people who make fake reviews for their employer to counteract some bad reviews. I wouldn't trust it for smaller companies.

I've been asked by a shitty (billion $ plus) company to write one of these type of unjustified positive reviews, directly after the rest of my devops team had quit and only days before I handed in my own notice. Needless to say I declined.

I've worked at lots of employers who ask current employees for positive Glassdoor reviews shortly after a disgruntled former employee writes a bad review.

I wouldn't trust anything on that site. The positive reviews are written under duress and the negative reviews have an axe to grind.

And then those bad reviews magically disappear just like the 150,000 reviews of the Robinhood app that have disappeared.

It's more complicated than that. Jeff Bezos has a lot of money and relatively little political power. You can't just be rich; you also have to be in the right social groups.

If money truly equaled political power, we'd look more like Hong Kong pre-1997 (and arguably pre-2020).

> relatively little political power

He bought a newspaper. I would say he has plenty of political power.

To add to this, he owns the Washington Post, THE paper for DC

TIL it's Washington DC. I assumed it was Washington state, due to Amazon's presence there.

You are not alone.

He also had cities across the country doing cartwheels to get HQ2. He got an entire neighborhood in Arlington VA renamed, got a heliport approved, and other perks.

Being able to advertise to the proles isn’t actually that valuable without a level of coordination that’s beyond bezos.

If you're worth a hundred billion dollars, your Senators will be calling YOU for lunch, no matter who your friends are.

can we please ban centimeter please? this guy is an actual racist

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25954606

Because it's still a problem. More people need to know and understand how the world works, and importantly, how it's working against them! :-)

Can't repeat this enough. "Its a big club and you ain't in it" - George Carlin. A lot of people are waking up to the coordination between the Oligarchs. Its hardly a surprise. The politicians, their government lackeys and media are in bed with them nice and comfy only feigning outrage when the system appears threatened.

I love this quote from Carlin:

It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

"Think of how dumb the average American is. And then realize half of them are dumber than that."

The interesting thing about this quote is that there's a decent chance it's wrong. Is there a reason to believe that half the people are below the average? (As opposed to the median.)

Carlin is exposing his own ignorance of statistics with this quote. It's akin to when people criticize the grammar of others whilst making a grammatical mistake.

Mode, median, and mean are all accurately described as averaging techniques. Mean is the most commonly used average, but they are not synonymous.

Well except that outside of mathematics and statistics they quite literally are to the layman

I think it's entirely reasonable to hold laypeople to the standards of what is taught in a typical middle school pre-algebra curriculum.

Median is a form of average. Here is the first definition for average from Merriam-Webster:

> a single value (such as a mean, mode, or median) that summarizes or represents the general significance of a set of unequal values

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/average

Have you ever used "average" when you meant median? Carlin is speaking in the vernacular. I've never heard anyone use "average" when they meant median.

I have. When I talk about "the average person," I usually mean median or mode. Otherwise, you end up with hilarious statements like "the average family has 1.88 cars" which does not make logical sense.

Because lord knows, nothing would George Carlin's act funnier than... a better grasp of statistics.

His joke is funny and the point is made. I find it funny that the joke about peoples' intelligence may contain a mistake. Hence my comment.

IQ distribution is symmetrical by design (it's a normal distribution), so he's still right. https://www.123test.com/interpretation-of-an-iq-score/

Also even if that weren't true, "average" isn't necessarily synonymous with "mean". The mean, median, and mode are all types of averages.

Maybe don't be so quick to criticize next time.

I don't know all the particulars of IQ distribution but I do know that it's controversial to say that it accurately measures intelligence. Carlin was talking in vernacular and so I think it's safe to assume he was not necessarily talking about IQ tests.

Even though IQ is designed to be normally distributed do you really think it actually is a normal distribution? It's a lofty goal and I'm sure it gets as close as one can but does this perfectly match up with reality? I have my doubts, hence my claim that there's a decent chance Carlin's comment is wrong.

Yes, median and mode are averages but few people mean those when they say "average". I doubt Carlin was statistically sophisticated enough to use average instead of median. Had he meant the median I think it reasonable to assume he would have said median. Do you commonly say "average" when talking about the mode or median? I doubt it.

Maybe don't be so quick to criticize next time.

Perhaps we could both benefit from this sage advice.

He's making a joke, not supporting his dissertation. He's allowed to be fast and loose with ideas for a laugh, as a professional comedian.

Do you think when he says things like "Takes the cake. Ya know, say 'Boy he really takes the cake'...Where? Where do ya take a cake? to the movies?" That he's exposing his own ignorance of idioms?

Yes, he's making a joke. It's funny and a pithy remark. The point is made. I find it an interesting point because when mocking other peoples' intelligence one ought to make certain they are correct. Sort of how when one criticizes another person's grammar they should make sure they didn't make a grammar mistake too.

In a normal distribution mean = median.

Do you believe intelligence is truly a normal distribution? It's commonly modeled as such but is it actually truly a normal distribution? A normal distribution is a continuous function and the set of people is discrete. It's a great model but...is actually correct?

I made that point on reddit a month ago, and some wag pointed out that since I evidently didn't know IQ scores were a bell curve, it appeared I was in the lower half.

This is funny because a bell curve is a continuous function and the set of people is discrete. The bell curve is a model of the population at large but I have my doubts that it's a perfect model and that it perfectly matches up with reality. I think the commenter may be the lower half!

This is why I hate Carlin's stuff, it's so fitting for the internet tech sites because the main point of it is jeering and sneering at people who aren't you, who aren't woke. George Carlin was a Hollywood film star with a net worth in the millions if not tens of millions. He's on stage, not working a 9-5, getting you to laugh with him at all the "idiots".

It's a big club and he was in it.

I disagree, having a net worth of tens of millions doesn’t make you comparable to an oligarch.

Depending on where you live, if you don’t have 30-70 million in liquid assets, you are middle class (or below).

Oh come on, there is no definition of middle class anywhere that includes someone with $29M in liquid assets.

I just defined it that way, go to Manhattan and you’ll see I am right.

In what place can you have 15 million and be middle class?

Manhattan, NY.

I wasn't comparing Carlin to an Oligarch, I was complaining about the culture of quoting Carlin. If you posted "everyone except me is dumb" you'd get downvoted. If you post Carlin saying "everyone except us is dumb" you get upvoted.

Thats a fair point. I’m mostly just pushing back on the idea that Carlin is a member of the club merely because he was famous and had a few tens of millions.

Haha! Great point! Although, posting on this website odds are you are in the club compared to most of the world :)

I e pathize with the sentiment but theres a categorical difference between comparisons. A first world technical professional compared to a third world subsistence farmer is perhaps similar in wealth disparity. I do not agree the difference in influence in similar.

This is just an ad hominem attack.

We’re better off not living in world where no one can have an opinion unless it’s on a direct, currently lived experience. That’s some identity politics nonsense.

Which hominem do you think I am attacking?

You can have any opinion you like, but if your opinion consists of passing around second hand sneers, it's a crappy low-value opinion. "It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." - "haw haw look at all the dumb sleeping people being this new". That's not an opinion, not a valuable commentary, it's just sneering.

Carlin, obviously. You’re attacking him rather than his commentary.

If you think his commentary isn’t useful, insightful, whatever, that’s fine. But basing your critique on his social/financial position is not good form.

It's a big club and he was in it.

When he died his net worth was estimated to be around 10 million, but that came pretty late in life. For a lot of his life he was probably comfortable but far from wealthy.

It sounds conspiratorial to the average person, who isn't all that politicized or interested -- until it gets 'em. When it comes for you, it gets ya (via deplatforming or stock shennanigans or mortgage crisis bailouts or big wars and lies or whatever), and the online mainstream media Zeitgeist seems to support it, you join in on the understanding that big money corrupts and populism is worth a thought or two.

Fitting username :)

Yeah. It's always a conspiracy until it isn't.

Citadel is a hedge fund that owns Melvin Capital Management.

Melvin is a $GME Short Seller that is predicted to loose BILLIONS due to people taking the free market back.

Citadel owns the app Robinhood.

Robinhood banned the purchase of $GME shares, while selling was still allowed.

How in the world is that NOT market manipulation?

Does Citadel actually own Robinhood? I couldn't find any source on that.

No, Citadel is RH's largest customer.

https://cdn.robinhood.com/assets/robinhood/legal/RHS%20SEC%2...

Citadel also bailed out Melvin to the tune of $2.75bn. https://cointelegraph.com/news/financial-ties-between-robinh...

I think Robinhood sends them the retail order flow. I don't know about ownership. The conflict of interest is the same.

Citadel does not own Robinhood.

> Robinhood banned the purchase of $GME shares, while selling was still allowed

They had no choice. They had run out of capital to execute the orders they were getting.

They allowed people to unwind their existing positions, but not to create new ones. Considering trading was still going on elsewhere, not locking people into their current positions would have been worse.

Because Big Money spends big money to make people not notice things.

Money they also run media, and when things settle down people read NYTimes, listen to NPR, and it slowly eats away at what they've learned until they're right back where they started.

"Well things aren't perfect but they could be far worse, and I'm so happy we have Bill Gates to fighting polio and malaria."

Bingo, this whole fiasco has highlighted it hard (600%+) though. I'll get a lot of hate for this I know.

My issue is why people think it's not working for them too.

Yes there is corruption and fckery in WS. But make no mistake. Those Fckers are also making sure our companies have capital, ensure activity etc.

The trickle down BS doesnt come from govmnt or taxes, it comes from WS. Not NEARLY a percentage of what is deserved, but it does.

The change needs to happen at the bottom, minimum wage, basic living standards, quality of life etc.

then Reddit wouldn't pay attention to assholes on WS who we bailed out.

I think it's because reddit is in a panic. Gamestop is probably trying to make it more representative of the whole rather than pay attention to anything from the past week or so. Those are not from average reviewers. They're from emotional redditors caught up in the moment probably.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to HN. We want thoughtful, information-rich, curious conversation here. This is obviously not that.

Maybe you don't owe big money which runs everything any better, but you definitely owe this community better if you're posting to it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25951489.

edit: deleted, not worth it.

Lol, "just make your own platform"

We’ve got billions of people who need to feel sufficient confidence in the media and authorities to take vaccines nobody has used before at a time when every media outlet has some agenda to monkey around with what we know to be true. Not cool.

People have taken them before. There were tests. A relative of mine was in one. Furthermore, the media doesn't certify which vaccines are safe. There are various governmental agencies in different countries for that.

> Furthermore, the media doesn't certify which vaccines are safe.

The media plays a critical role in encouraging people to get a vaccine.

I would be very surprised if any reputable media was telling anyone a vaccine that wasn't certified.

Yeah, “media doesn’t certify the...” I think I’ve heard that before. Some government process does it all according to Hoyle, sure. Sounds familiar.

The card game manufacturer? I have no idea what you're talking about.

"According to Hoyle" is an English idiom. It means that all the rules are followed and everything is fair.

Edmund Hoyle wrote a set of rules for the card game whist. His name was used in subsequent collections of rules for all sort of games. "According to Hoyle" has become idiomatic for "according to the rules."

Thank you. I've managed to go forty years without hearing that one. Now that I know the next level meaning, I'm still confused about what is being referenced.

At this point I'm almost convinced that CIA (or perhaps one of its rivals) is running some psy-op on the citizenry. It's as if they'll get a bonus as soon as a million Americans die of covid. (hmmm... maybe we should watch for big spenders later this year...) Everything that comes out of CNN, the social media firms, etc. seems calculated to make most Americans less likely to submit to vaccination.

I say this while wearing masks in public religiously, having already received the second dose of Pfizer. Covid really is killing people, and will continue to kill more and more as time goes on. We won't see "herd immunity" for years if ever.

While I agree in some ways... let me ask you, how do you know you are on the “right” side of any mask or Covid or vax debate? You get your news from the same places “the people who are wrong” do.

It’s a thought experiment; not an implication.

First of all, I don't get my news from those places. It has taken over a decade, but after flipping the bozo bit on dozens of news media firms, I feel I am a bit closer to having some idea of what's going on. If all you have is e.g. NBC News, then assuming that all the "wishful thinking" (which at times is over half of the content: "this time we've found a war we can win!") is exactly wrong will get you pretty close.

Second, you don't have to read the news to know that people are dying. In vulnerable populations, the increase is impossible to hide, especially since no one has gotten the flu this year. Old physicians and researchers who aren't trying to build their personal brands all agree (and have agreed since February last year) that masks and isolation are the ways to cope with respiratory pandemics. I'm hopeful for the vaccines, but I fear they won't deal well with the mutations that have never been conclusively ruled out. At the very least, vaccines are unlikely to harm people who don't have some sort of weird precondition. Besides which, unlike 99% of USA healthcare, they're free.

Wow, they don't even try to hide anymore.

Where does it end the censorship? This is starting to look real bad.

The system is rigged. Next we will find out Google Ventures invested in RobinHood. 100k bad reviews is a lot in recent days perhaps many were bots? I dunno

The owners have shown up:

https://intercoin.org/nothingisfree

Stop the conspiracy theories. It's not Parlor here. Google don't give a fuck about RH. But they need to protect businesses and cannot be the judge. Think about someone influential who wants to ruin a restaurant and organize something similar to that. A low rating these days kills a business. Not allowing organized activities like this is a good thing.

Don't worry, RH's good rating will die over time.

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