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Comment by glenvdb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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