Google Deleted over 100k Negative Robinhood Reviews | Hacker News Reader

Google Deleted over 100k Negative Robinhood Reviews

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251 pointsJacKTrocinskI87 comments

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25953538

Didn’t realize we already had a post going, sorry about the dupe!

It happens!

I hate Google with passion, for the things they do, but this is what they did for every brigade-rating that I can remember. And it makes sense. It's not anyone reviewing the app, it's people mass 1-starring the app because they decided to do so as a hive-mind. It's essentially fake reviews and I wouldn't be surprised if it's automated.

Also, as far as I gather, people who wrote a human-like text review to go with their rating didn't get their review removed.

Is it fake if the app seemingly became unfit for purpose if legitimate users were unable to buy GME? Robinhood changed the utility of the application, not the users.

Is a credit card still a credit card if they detect suspicious purchase patterns and suspend it?

Is a rating system still a rating system if it detects cancel culture and ignores ratings?

Is a broker still a broker if they follow SEC guidelines for limiting consumers who haven't filled out the experience questionnaire? How about if they are a discount broker and don't even have additional service for those who are qualified to trade options, etc?

Really what we are seeing is more and more populist diatribe against the normal systems we have had for decades. Sure, some things will actually be improvable, but what is improvable and what is just the average expertise of a mob that responds with emotions being extremely low?

If a stock trading app manipulates the market by preventing purchases, while allowing selling, of certain stocks that are popular with a democratized hedge fund community, they deserve all the 1 star reviews they get.

It's not just an useless app now, it's an actively dangerous scam app.

It already was a dangerous scam app. The data on trades went straight to front running traders, so they could feed their algorithms and profit off your plans.

Is that actually true? I thought "frontrunning" was one of the fundamental things that is forbidden by stock trading regulation. Does it not apply when done with those new-fangled computers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_running

I mean, that's what you get for not paying for a service. It's a trade-off people knowingly took.

the thing is that robin hood it's not a trading app, you don't buy a share on your name, those shares are pooled and bought and selled off the official market.

If you want to invest, use a real broker, but then you will have to pay commissions.

Also, have in mind that even if they say that they are commission free, you pay with higher spreads, so if the transaction price is 1, robinhood will sell it to you by 1.02 and bough by 0.98, getting a margin from you each time you make a transaction with them.

Commissions have the same impact, increasing your effective spread.

> If a stock trading app manipulates the market by preventing purchases

They're likely close to hitting their collateral limits with the clearing house[0]. During yesterday's 5-minute interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo, RH's CEO mentioned their collateral obligations (plus unnamed regulatory requirements) as the reason for preventing new positions in GME. Every trade creates a collateral obligation with the clearing house for 2 days, so if RH goes bankrupt while the trades are being settled, nobody loses. The amount of this collateral obligation is a function of the volatility of the stock. Lots of high-volatility trades in the middle of the 2-day settlement process eat up collateral very quickly. If RH runs out of collateral, none of their customers can trade until some of the pending trades finish clearing.

The reason for still allowing people to close positions is presumably because people would scream bloody murder even harder if they were suddenly unable to exit these high-volatility positions.

Collusion to manipulate markets, particularly in such an incredibly high-profile situation, seems unlikely. Whatever RH does, they know there will likely be investigations, so they're almost certainly on their best behavior right now.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25951475

So they have a legitimate technical reason for why the app doesn't work.

How does that excuse them? If cat picture app has issues with their image hosting partner it is not my problem, that's the entire point of going through a middle-man like stock brokerage

It's a problem, but the accusation of criminal market manipulation appears unwarranted.

I thought we are discussing app reviews.

I specifically quoted the claim of market manipulation in the GP.

There is a reason why stocks get straight up halted from trading due to extreme volatility. Robinhood had to the same on this extreme event to keep their company solvent. Just because folks don't understand how the market works doesn't mean it is a nefarious plot against the little guy.

IF they are already requiring people to have the cash in their account to cover buys, how can they not have the collateral to cover them. They could have disabled options trading right? But why buying with cash?

I think the issue is that they're allowing people to use cash right away when they sell, rather than waiting until T+2, and they can't instantly unilaterally change their ToS. They could block people from selling, but not block them from buying, but that would cause all kinds of problems.

As I remember, eTrade also used to not require you to wait until T+2 to reinvest the proceeds from stock sales.

Robinhood made a decision that cost its users from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps more. If there's ever been a more justified reason to give an app a 1-star rating, it's this. Google was out of line.

I can see all actual reviews of the app with 1 star rating explained in text missing today. Yesterday I could see plenty of them, today these are gone.

They rate 1 star based on their actual experience. The service provided by app is not the same as it used to be, new rules were applied on-the-fly. We could speculate if Google should remove those ratings from people that never used the app...

I’m not sure mass deletions are the most clever approach. Seems like a systematic failure that needs to be fixed because these things will keep happening.

It’s a hard problem but Google doesn’t seem up to the task.

Let’s say you had a short position and then the app decided that those stocks can’t be traded with anymore. What do you do? Even the smallest act of downvoting the company is taken away from you.

I’m not disagreeing with Robinhoods position, but if I do I want to be able to make my voice heard with the tiniest fraction.

Raises a question also, if an app is the biggest front facing area, should reviews only be about technical prowess or do we want that simply because we are developers and it makes our life easier? Maybe tags? Categories?

How are they fake reviews? The company has done something deeply unacceptable to its user base - why aren’t they entitled to update their reviews?

Maybe I'm underestimating both how active users are at reviewing apps and how many people use Robinhood, but I doubt there are over 100k people who updated their reviews because of yesterday. Personally I'd be shocked if the app had 100k reviews total last week.

edit unless they offered basically real money to review the app, I haven't used it.

There were definitely at least 100,000 reviews submitted yesterday, based on my observation. However, there are huge numbers of people involved with this story - millions on the wsb subreddit alone. Bear in mind that most people don't submit reviews, but being angry at something is much more likely to cause someone to do so.

I don’t know how many users they have either, but re: whether it 100k reviews total last week.

Normally I think you could expect only a few percent of your users to leave reviews.

If you then piss off your whole user base collectively with actions that are unfair to them, then it is not a valid argument to say that because there are more reviews that the reviews cannot be real.

I am not saying that all of these 100k reviews are real. But I am saying that how many or few reviews they had before does not count because until you do something really bad or something extremely good 90-99% of users are not going to leave a review.

Is it possible to automate those reviews? As far as I can tell, you need the app installed to review. I'm guessing you can only review one. I'm guessing you'd need to use separate accounts, but that you could use one physical device (although Google could obviously limit reviews-per-device to a reasonable number). Can you affiliate more than one account with the same bank account?

The hive mind effect enabled by Internet technologies is a far reaching and deadly serious problem.

Amazon does it with positive reviews. They add fake reviews for their products. As we know Google removes negative reviews, but do we know if Google manipulates reviews of other products (where Google makes money) like Netflix, Uber, Disney+? It doesn't matter whether it's negative or positive, we can't trust reviews anyway. They have incentives to make you download or buy apps.

Does Google make much money from those? Do they have a policy like apple where they take a cut of the subscription fees?

>For apps and in-app products offered through Google Play, the service fee is equivalent to 30% of the price. You receive 70% of the payment. The remaining 30% goes to the distribution partner and operating fees.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

So when does censorship of or manipulating user ratings make an app store responsible to its users for failing to prevent harm to them (or wasted time) from bad apps, mismanaged services, scams and frauds? Ppl see the 4 stars, download the app, wire RH a part of their nest egg, RH predictably fails to honor commitments in ways explained by the deleted app reviews, and RH damages app users. At what point is Google responsible for that mess? Never?

I'm not sure how I feel about this to be honest.

I appreciate they were following their guidelines and wouldn't like anyone to troll an app like this but I don't think google should have removed bad reviews. Unless court ordered maybe, based on FCC findings of market manipulation or something like that. Robinhood sells their client's data to financial institutions. These institutions then can use that to skim off Robinhood's clients. The GameStop fiasco puts all that at risk so they pull the plug. Like a casino kicking you out because you’re winning too much at poker and taking money from their high rollers, who pay a premium to peek at your cards.

https://blockworks.co/robinhood-sells-your-data-but-does-tha...

There's a real danger here that there are high level summaries upon summaries from those who don't really understand the details of the markets. Every broker will have various liquidity pools and those pools will be pinged to execute your order. The order has to get best execution (there are legal requirements on it).

Without knowing the internal details of RH all of this is speculation. I think that what folk are saying is that Citadel pay for the information on order flow (they don't provide any liquidity?). it sounds like that pays RH bills who have to pay execution and exchange fees. If that's true then isn't the choice to pay the information cost to Citadel or pay some fees to another broker?

I suspect that your casino analogy would be more accurate if the gambler was borrowing money from another casino (i.e. leverage or buying options) and they said 'You've hit your limits in borrowing' or the main casino you're in said 'We don't take bets higher than X'.

Still, in the context of reviews, it's not the job of Google to mitigate the fact that Robin Hood botched it's PR side and couldn't (or doesn't want to) explain its rationale to their users clearly.

From the POV of RH's users, the company and the app just pulled a fast one on them, costing individuals lots of money in both real costs and opportunity.

I agree with that. I assume that this is an algo at work.

Thanks for that info on liquidity pools I wasn’t aware. Based on what you said my analogy would be more along the 'You've hit your limits / no bets higher than X’ line. I definitely don’t know the internal details of RH or am an expert so have speculated and it is probably a bad over simplification of poor information I’ve read from media sources. Regarding use of RH data I just thought if I was Citadel and paid for the information on order flow, I’d be in a better, well informed position to make educated guess on the market, which people on RH wouldn’t be in.

RH doesn't guarantee best execution, unlike a regular broker.

At least the silver lining in all this is that more and more people are becoming aware of what censorship feels like.

This is worrying indeed because the negative reviews are clearly justified.

Are they though? Do we know all the facts? This is a heavily regulated market and Congress are going to get involved. Let's wait and see.

One thing to consider: if they've provided leveraged finance to buy this stock then they're exposed by this massive move too. They therefore have to manage risk, and so limiting further exposure does make sense. If these people can't pay their bills (if leveraged), I don't know who takes on that risk. It might be RH or this could be passed on to others. Either way someone needs to take that risk on. Some have asked why not just stop the leveraged finance, and I don't know the answer.

Another thing to consider: is it legal to allow manipulation of prices? The folk are trying to hold the price up. This is a tricky subject to consider. As a professional there are various rules on what is manipulation. Presumably a broker has some responsibility here.

All in all, who knows if this is clearly justified. Folk are equally able to go and place orders via other brokers. Whining that broker X can't trade Y doesn't hold water as an argument. If they don't trade X, find a different broker (this is entirely standard practice. Not every broker can trade every instrument). You're not required to execute there.

I'm afraid that folk are going to have a really bad wake up call. These markets are really complex and the warnings that your capital is at risk is a really big warning to be heeded. Don't invest what you can't afford to lose. I'm sorry that people are losing here. :(

I downloaded this app to buy shares as advertised

App didn’t allow me to buy shares

Delete app, 1* rating, false advertising

Can I propose changing the description slightly to frame how big of an issue it is:

I downloaded the app to buy shares. It is the weekend. The markets are closed, so I can't buy shares. Delete app, 1* rating, false advertising.

There is always fine print. The challenge is that the fine print here is really complicated. In extreme situations there are rules to consider.

I’d find it unlikely that 500,000 people would download an app expecting to buy a share while the market is closed, but if you do, fine, let them leave their review.

I can easilly believe that people genuinely downloaded and signed up in the expectation of buy GameStop/Bitcoin/tulips or whatever this weeks craze is. When they find it doesn’t work (because the backend didn’t scale or because the app maker decided not to sell tulips) they’re are genuinely annoyed.

This isn’t people downloading the app just to rate it 1*, based in the hype it’s quite possible these reviews are all genuine customers.

There are people like me also who rate all apps 1* just because fuck Apple and fuck Google and fuck anyone trying to add value to their app stores. And I encourage all friends to do the same.

This is the sort of nose-upturned view many of us are guilty of, regardless of whether that was your intent. Ive seen those "users are stupid" anecdata floating around these parts with impunity.

People aren't stupid and 100K plus people making a complaint can't be seen as a mere "users are stupid" scenario.

This condescent of people who use our products will catch up with us someday and I hope it does. People arent half-wits and we might have to acceot the absurd possibility that we a wrong and crap.

The original parent is 'This is worrying indeed because the negative reviews are clearly justified.'. I don't agree with this and the thread explains why.

There are two issues to your comment:

1. Trading (including risk management) is really complicated. It isn't something that you can pick up in 30 seconds after downloading an app. This exact scenario (where broker stops taking orders on a stock likely due to internal risk limits) is a great example of an unusual scenario that has to be risk managed. This isn't some nose-upturned view but a fact.

2. Many of the comments here are made in good faith but it is pure speculation. 500K reviews were apparently posted and automatically removed. In any usual day we'd assume this was the usual spam. Again there's speculation about why there were removed. My point here is that there needs to be time to actually find out what happened.

There's also an article supporting my points that sometimes there are restrictions (fine print) that stop trading.

From: https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22255031/robinhood-gamest...

Quote: As a brokerage firm, we have many financial requirements, including SEC net capital obligations and clearinghouse deposits. Some of these requirements fluctuate based on volatility in the markets and can be substantial in the current environment,” the post argues. “To be clear, this was a risk-management decision, and was not made on the direction of the market makers we route to.”

Trading may be complicated, but when SV releases an app to make it simple, you can’t use that as an excuse.

The supposed complicated part of trading has nothing to do with this particular trade, from the perpective of the trader unless you can demonstrate it to be so. It might be complicated for brokers but certainly not the trader.

Exactly. As a small app maker I can't get a fake 1-start review removed but I guess the big guys can. Then again if I gave a shit about reviews my apps wouldn't be open source.

The rules are different for them of course. I got some spam one star comment with just some emoji which I can't remove but big players can remove totally justified reviews by legitimate users.

It's even more worrying that Google has not pulled the app...

This is bad.

I can absolutely understand it for a political pile-on, or an unrelated protest, but this is a fundamental complaint with the service not following operating procedure.

If I were king, the app would be pulled until financial amends were made.

This attitude is a big problem, because once you allow it for political pile-on, it's suddenly available for other issues, like this one.

It's what every free speech advocate has been saying for years, or decades, or hundreds of years, yet people generally cheer on censorship when its for their own political side.

"I'm all for free speech, but you can't let that guy say those things."

The thing I was attempting to describe is a vote against an app because (eg) its parent company donated to Republicans, something which isn't about the app or service.

The Robinhood review bomb isn't that, it's a proper and serious complaint against the service.

Here's a better source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22255245/google-deleting-...

All of those reviews are valid since the app fails to perform its core functionality

There's more ditching to do. Avoid Play store and install adware-free FLOSS apps from F-Droid.

https://f-droid.org

I always check FDroid first, but the selection is far from sufficient. I do hope it continues to grow.

Is there a FOSS replacement? I highly doubt it.

I highly recommend how to read Valve's blog posts about review bombing. It's insightful and well done.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...

Another example of Google behaving as a crooked company.

A link to a screenshot of a tweet. I’m as mad as the next person that they did this, but could we get a better source?

I feel naive; what's the incentive for Google to do this?

Their billionaire buddies.

It seems to be in Google's vein. When they removed call recording API from Android, it was a sign they side with all sort of scammers. Call recording is an ultimate tool for fighting any scummy salesmen, especially from insurance companies. Probably they were starting to lose money and asked Google too remove call recording so customers can't defend themselves from predatory practices.

Seems more likely that they saw legal liability in states and countries that have a 2 party consent requirement for recording.

Don't you dare speak out against your corporate overlords, not that anyone can hear.

Corporate bois protecting each other.. What a surprise

Google should have deleted the app! Otherwise they are in on it and should be investigated too.

Google should not curate reviews. If they do, they should clearly state this on the front page.

Well, there are spammers. It is alright to delete fake reviews by bots. But reviews from real people should stay. Even if they have stupid opinions and complain that the app does not work on their old mobile and give 1 star, when the app tells explicitely to have Android x+ or a fast mobile phone.

And in events like this, even more.

I bet I can find another HN thread where HN people DEMAND that Google curates reviews and apps :D

It doesn't seem unlikely that they have som anti-brigading software that automatically or semi-automatically deletes certain reviews. Such as when huge amounts of people in a short time instalsl an app just to immediately leave a bad review, and then uninstall.

> Such as when huge amounts of people in a short time instalsl an app just to immediately leave a bad review, and then uninstall.

What would normal behaviour look like in a hyped-up app that ended up disappointing?

good point

even after restoring the previous ratings who would trust the score

I do wonder if there's scope for a class action lawsuit against Google over it's review management on the Play Store. Not just for this, it's just so obviously broken to the point of being completely useless.

It only makes it worse for them, as everybody still rates them badly and just highlights both their crookedness.

At this point, does anyone take user submitted reviews seriously any more? I mean for anything.

Well the app was brigaded, They usually do that in such instances.

Was it brigaded or were users just justifiably upset by them removing capabilities without warning?

It is totally obvious that the Google Play Store has fake reviews on every single app. I am not talking about bots; I'm pretty sure Google does it themselves. I have found apps which do absolutely nothing correctly and there was not a single positive review in the comments. Still, the app had a 3.9 rating.

I don't look at stars and app reviews anymore -it all feels completely useless and fake.

I look at reviews from different star ratings and then compare the wording of the review. Usually you can skim out the fakes and morons.

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