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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Linked fron the article is another one saying Apple and Google are mass deleting negative reviews of the Robinhood app in their stores:

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

It's sort of crazy how all of these different things are eroding trust in all of these systems simultaneously. Some can trade, but not others, happy customer reviews are legitimate, angry customer reviews are not.

This is a weird time.

I'm glad that this sort of normally-invisible manipulation is being brought to light, however. People shouldn't be trusting these rigged systems.

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Your theory here being that Google and Apple are in on the scheme, which is to prop up a couple of hedge funds that were short GME, the most notable of which secretly still are short despite announcing having covered their position, because Google and Apple are big companies and big companies... like hedge funds? Or are in cahoots with Robinhood in some kind of Silicon Valley solidarity thing?

Not at all; my "theory" is that a lot of large institutions in our society that people put trust in to make decisions based upon are really way more arbitrary and less fair than is generally assumed.

Most people don't think about it because they never bump up against the invisible walls in normal use. Suddenly, they are on display for millions.

No grand conspiracy, just a widespread culture of "don't worry about how it works, we'll tell you if you win."

I'm lost. Explain to me why it is you think Apple and Google are removing these reviews.

To ensure that developers continue to develop for their platforms and users continue to turn to their platforms for implicit advice about apps, the same reason they do most things in their stores.

Apps with large install bases are implicitly valuable to the platform as they are popular with phone-buying customers. It's not in the platform's interest to alienate the developers of such apps as those apps, together, cause people to buy that platform's devices to run them. The incentives are aligned.

If I distributed VPN malware via enterprise certs, I would lose my developer account. When Facebook does it, they lose the enterprise cert.

If the secret goal here is to make sure that lucrative developers all get warm reviews, why don't all lucrative developers get warm reviews? Apple makes in fact not all that much money in the scheme of things, even in the just-the-app-store scheme of things, from Robinhood.

They do.

Go look at the review scores of all of the top apps in the app store. None are below 4 stars, unless they are apps for services where users don't have much of a choice in apps, such as crap companion apps for hardware or national services that people are forced to use.

So the fact this looks as one would expect without nefarious manipulation is proof of nefarious manipulation? Your argument is still a little difficult to follow.

He never suggested any conspiracy. He just noted how a confluence of events are really dramatically displaying our reliance on huge centralized services all at once. Between Trump and Parler de-platformization a few weeks ago to RH only allowing sells while Google and Apple clean up their reviews for them.

This is obviously part of google's stadia play to bankrupt GameStop. Can't you see it?

mass deletion of negative reviews is automatic and has been done before if it looks like spam / brigading (which this probably looks like). i think it's a reasonable explanation.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/12/in-reviews...

https://9to5google.com/2018/12/17/play-store-anti-spam-revie...

I don't think the negative reviews of Robinhood in the last day qualify as "spam" under any definition with which I am familiar.

I also see nothing wrong with brigading, if you are an actual legitimate user of an app and are unhappy with it.

Businesses solicit positive reviews all the time.

Every notable online review venue works to resist canvassed reviews, which break the whole concept of online reviews.

Almost every free iPhone app I install has a "enjoying our app? Rate it in the app store!" interstitial at some point in the user journey.

Is that "working to resist canvassed reviews"?

(I agree they should; I don't agree they are resisting it.)

It is not my claim that any online store does an effective job of policing canvassing, only that they all attempt to do so. No crowdsourced online review source is trustworthy. But they're untrustworthy because of canvassing.

I'll not also that soliciting a review of an app is not quite the same thing as organizing an effort to get a huge directional shift in reviews.

Agreed. Both are pretty clearly canvassing though, in my estimation.

It’d be neat if rather than just display a lifetime average they displayed a stock ticker for the ratings. You could see the app was good but then very lowly rated for a few days before ticking back up for example

Maybe more tangential, but isn't that the app itself asking, like a gatekeeper? I think if Apple generates that message or its triggered, then it's one-shot - if the user says "No", it will never be seen again (to be clear, to me and most, this is desired behavior).

So instead you have the app asking things like this, or "can we send you notifications?", and so if you say no, it can ask later, and not trigger the OS interaction until just-in-time.

yeah i'm not saying robinhood is in the right here, i personally. i just think that this may not be an example of apple/google conspiring to take action because of any triggers from the past two weeks' events.

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