Google reportedly scraps thousands of negative Robinhood reviews
cointelegraph.com
cointelegraph.com
Literally the only reason someone rates something is to affect/manipulate the rating.
Well, no. Maybe we're splitting hairs but when I rate something its to describe my experience, not to affect its overall rating. At no point do I think my one rating would have a meaningful impact on its overall score unless it has very few ratings to begin with.
Validated app purchase, app-store rating is a democracy.
I absolutely don't.
The math is simple though. Your vote is 1 added to a total. So is everyone's. The totals don't go above 0 tied with 0 based on your description. But clearly our votes don't all end in a 0-0 tie.
I would have to be a complete moron to think my vote had any impact on choosing the winner.
Otherwise, why rate at all?
to describe my experience.
Or just for fun?
Perhaps you want to influence opinion more than you think?
They were right. GME , BB, NOK to the moon.
If I say "well, this deserves three stars, so I'll give it a one-star review so as to pull the average closer to three" then I'm aiming to manipulate its rating, rather than rating it.
Note: I'm only guessing at Google's thought process here at the distinction between reviews and manipulation, and guessing at their detection algorithm; I'm not myself suggesting or implying that one-star reviewers are always engaging in manipulation. Of course you could honestly think an app deserves one star. The difference is unknowable to an outside observer. Only you can really know whether you're being honest, but that won't stop Google from assuming the worst.
Such reviews will naturally be at one end of the spectrum or the other - either one star or five stars, so as to maximize your voting power. So they might detect it in the case of reviews being bimodally distributed. I'd expect that two star reviews should always be treated as honest, so I'd recommend that as a review floor to prevent getting accused of manipulation and deleted.
I would speculate that this is the reason that Yelp created its Elite program — to incentivize people to write tons of reviews, including for places that were neither amazing nor horrible. This gives Yelp the crucial middle ground reviews that as you say are more likely to be accurate than just the highs and lows.
They obviously can't, and that's why people are outraged.
Funny that Steam does this too, but I find their reviews quite useful and accurate. Maybe because you rationalize your review and then give it an overall UP/DOWN, vs all these other approaches that ONLY give you the GO/NO-GO signaling...
Why is it a controversy that an app that doesn't let you buy stocks when it hurts insider hedge funds gets rated a derservingly minimal 1 star?
As I suggested in a sibling post, a two-star review should be immune to this accusation, so if I were you I'd use a strategy of "two stars is the new one star".
I understand the argument for removal, since Robinhood likely had no choice but to stop the trading. Ratings are meant to inform consumer choice, so a brigade of downvotes due to some recent controversy/memery is more likely to hurt consumer choice since it reduces the amount of information available. It means that one detail is drowning out all of the others, and regardless of whether a new customer would care about that detail, the fact is that it's the only one they'll be able to base their decision on while those votes stay up.
But on the other hand, app ratings are one of the very few powers consumers have to affect change in companies they do business with. Brigading the rating system (which has the effect of turning away new customers) is no different than bad word-of-mouth, where angry customers go out of their way to prevent others from doing business with the company that screwed them over. Even if a disgruntled customer goes a bit too far with hyperbole, that's their right. And it's a good thing that those things are possible, because it forces companies to always stay on their toes and think twice before doing something to hurt consumers.
It's the question of whether a consumer should have to "suck it up" when a company screws them over, or whether a company, whose full-time job it is to provide a particular service, should be held to a higher standard and be hurt when they provide bad service.
IMO, Google really should have not gotten involved here. This is an issue between Robinhood and its customers, whether or not you think what Robinhood did was fair. Google, a company being investigated for anti-competitive practices, just took another anti-consumer action.
What's going on right now is unprecedented, so it has to go through a complex review process. Just following the news is witch hunting.
This seems weird. Are they actually illegal? If yes, then shouldn't reviews be disabled in Germany.
Which is the courts way of saying "it is illegal when we see it, we just leave some nominal loophole noone can fulfil so we don't go against the letter of the law". All of this is just a lot of court cases influenced by some elaborate schemes to pick the right court (LG Hamburg preferably). But unfortunately those stand as long there isn't an explicit law changing the situation. Which won't happen, because the exact same laws and especially judgements defend corrupt politicians against journalists.
Also, any kind of free-speech movement is a no-go in Germany because "buhuh, but then the NeoNazis can say what they like!".
Basically in Germany/DACH free speech is heavily policed (ironically to stop NeoNazis voicing themselves) as to ensure it doesn't offend anyone so you end up with everyone only allowed to say either good or meh things in public/online.
Best example is the Austrian politician who had forced Facebook through a court order to have posts on her wall where people called her a corrupt traitor, deleted worldwide, under the argument that unless you can show proof of corruption, you calling them corrupt is libel according to the Austrian law, lol.
Even on platforms like Kununu (basically the Glasdoor of DACH) where employees can review their employers, if companies don't like the negative review employees leave, they can ask to have them removed citing similar laws, which makes the platform pretty much useless in the end as all reviews are either good or meh.
Honestly, Americans don't know how good they have it in the free speech category. Imagine not being able to call Trump corrupt on Twitter or say that Swaggy Bro Tech is an abusive sweatshop on Glassdoor/Google.
But as it currently stands, the 1% use the anti-libel laws in their favor to censor anything that undermines their power/credibility.
For example, if you're a senator and while I don't have proof that you are corrupt, you can't possible tell me with a straight face that you awarding a lucrative public contract to the company where your daughter is on the board of directors, is a pure coincidence or a meritocracy, even if the paper trail says it's all squeaky clean.
Not for much longer. Everyone supports censoring someone, so it's just a matter of time before it becomes a policy.
I personally think that we should be intolerant of intolerance, until of course that message is co-opted by "elites" (billionaires, politicians or whoever you believe is the group(s) pulling the strings) to suppress any criticism of their power.
No, Robinhood did not halt trading. They prevented _buying_ Gamestop and only allowed selling which can only do one thing - drive the price down.
That’s entirely different.
There’s a word for it: manipulation
It’s illegal.
Stop spreading FUD.
Listen to his explanations, he never says what were the legal or business justification for stopping the buys and only allowing the sells.
His only explanations were that the company took the actions just because.
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/9a1b24e6-0433-462a-a860-c2504ea56...
And if you already held more than that quantity of shares you couldn’t buy more shares.
This is not stuff most people worry about most of the time. Generally if you buy a stock on Monday you still want it on Wednesday; even if you don’t, we live in a society, and you’ll probably cough up the money anyway because that’s what you’re supposed to do. But at some level of volatility things break down. If a stock is really worth $400 on Monday and $20 on Wednesday, there is a risk that a lot of the people who bought it on Monday won’t show up with cash on Wednesday. Something very bad happened to them between Monday and Wednesday; some of them might not have made it. You need to make sure the collateral is sufficient to cover that risk. The more likely it is that a stock will go from $400 to $20, or $20 to $400 for that matter, 6 the more collateral you need.
But I suggest you read the entire thing - it does an excellent job discussing what's going on and showing why the current GME narrative makes no sense.
Anyway, 2 points:
1. This is not about margin accounts. When trading on margin, it's RH that's financing you and taking on the risk. That's separate from what the clearing house does. Incidentally, RH did increase margin requirements due to the higher volatility.
2. The problem is RH offers instant settlement. That is, you can use your proceeds from a trade immediately in the apo, before even the trade is settled. That exposes RH, and the clearing house to settlement failures, and that's true regardless if the trade was done on a margin account or not. And that's the risk that clearing houses try to mitigate via asking for collateral.
edit: from the Bloomberg article you posted: "The trouble on Thursday began around 10 a.m., when after days of turbulence, the DTCC demanded significantly more collateral from member brokers, according to two people familiar with the matter.". So I have my money settled in my broker's account for months, I'm buying without lending any additional money, why can't my broker show that I have all the collateral needed or even transfer my money? Am I missing something here? Does it work per broker and not per broker's account maybe? So people with settled cash are affected becasuse of other people doesn't have enough collateral? Or may be because showing/transferring collateral to DTCC is not instantenius?
DLive recently destroyed people's ability to be monetized if they weren't streaming gaming content.
They had a similar hit to their reviews. Doesn't look like Google took action there. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.dlive&hl=en...
F*k Google. * (1 star)
There are 2.4M ratings total, I don’t know how many there were prior to today or yesterday, but right now there are 2.4M.
If you sort by most recent, there are loads of 1 star written reviews.
You don’t need to write a review to leave a rating, you just need to “own” the app, meaning you have to hit Get on the free app. This acts like a $0 purchase. I stopped the download immediately after.
Now here is where my commentary becomes useless. I tried leaving a 1 star just to see if anything would happen. Nothing, so I start looking around for a way to undo because I don’t actually use Robinhood. Couldn’t find one before I made my way back to the page just to see the star rating I gave was removed.
Now one of two things could have happened, and the first is fairly likely.
1. By taking the actions I took in the sequence and time that I took them, Apple could have registered my rating as an attempt to bomb the score. That’s fine, I wasn’t intending to leave it.
2. Apple could also be monitoring scores and reviews.
Actually there’s a third possibility:
3. There could be a delay between when reviews are written and when they affect the score, so if a review was left yesterday, it might not act as a weight on the score until next Tuesday or whatever the delay is. I’m not familiar enough with the App Store to say.
It does look like there were a lot more reviews in the App Store than the Google Play Store to begin with, so it would take more negative reviews to significantly affect it.
Mostly I’m just curious why we’re seeing this in the Google Play Store but are not hearing anything about what is going on in the Google Play Store. Perhaps someone else with a history with the App could follow up on this that has actually used the App or is motivated to re-rate it to see if their rating goes through.
Who's "they" is an interesting and debatable question, big tech, the finance sector, the gov, whoever else, but one thing for sure, we're the peasants in that story.
Not a company doing something genuinely bad and real customers stating their dissatisfaction.
Robinhood had 13 million users as of 2020, and Motherboard was reporting that more than half of all robinhood users held GME this week. 100k reviews in a day seems quite likely if the real values are even half these numbers. https://mobile.twitter.com/motherboard/status/13547982444553...
- Google automates everything and adds its 'AI' to it
- Even 10K reviews in such a short space of time will trigger the AI and then it will probably flag or even remove those reviews by itself (the AI is probably trained to see this as fraudulent)
- The whole app review thing is probably gamed already and the actual fraudulent reviews are never picked up because fraudsters are (sometimes) good at being fraudulent
I have no vested interest in Google and actually think people should de-Google as much as possible, but this is the same company that gets featured on HN frequently for its non-existent support.
Whereas the users prevented from buying meme stocks are actually using the app and unhappy that they can no longer trade meme stocks.
Why all the obfuscation and thought experiments around such a simple and blatant reality?