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Comment by rplnt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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...

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’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.

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?

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...

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.

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