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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think this is about the specific news or Robinhood's specific actions. More likely Google have a policy (or a habit) of removing reviews that don't look "organic", or reviews that seem driven by news or agenda. App developers will more be more likely to publish on your platform if their reviews are less likely to be unfairly mobbed or something.

Just guessing, obviously, and I'm not sure how the contours of such a policy would work. Clearly organic bad reviews will often be correlated with each other, and with negative news.

> More likely Google have a policy (or a habit)

Or automated system

Google doesn't want fake reviews on the play store. Its as simple as that. Google is removing these probably because they look like fake reviews, and don't care enough to spend time and resources investigating it.

How do you define "fake review"? People are not happy with a company and its app and they are "punishing" the company, what is the purpose of reviews if not this?

Exactly, how do you define "fake review"? Google sees 100K+ negative reviews coming in for one app on one day. What do you think they're going to do? Take 'em all down and call it a day. I really doubt that there is some incredibly corrupt culture in Google Play reviews or something like some are suggesting. I really the product owners just want to go home for the day/turn off the computer and eat dinner, just like everybody else that has a job.

How is that not fraud though? They are advertising a manipulated review score. The 1 stars aren't bots, they are people. Would it be legal for e.g. yelp to remove a string of bad reviews stemming from a catering company giving a wedding food poisoning?

I'm not saying I condone what happened. I just see people claiming corruption, and I personally doubt that. I think its more along the form of "lets remove these reviews for now and analyze them tomorrow"

Corruption is a tricky subject. Pawns of a dictatorship, a mafia or any hierarchical corrupt structure... They might not be aware of what's actually going on but that doesn't change the fact that the structure is corrupt. Whatever caused this, Google's guidelines, its business practices, its investor relations, is corrupt.

So, if prosecution or police receives too many (above average) complaints about something on a single day, they should just trash all of them and go home, is that what you are saying?

No. I never said that Google taking the reviews down is warranted or they are in the right or something. I'm just saying I don't think it's a malicious attack on users. And app store reviews of a stock trading app and the consensus of the general public on their police are completely different social scenarios, so comparing them is aimless.

No, those entities are subject to laws. Google and friends have transcended the mundane world of us mere mortals.

If you're using an AI, I assume they see that the comments coming in all follow an extremely similar format or come from suspicious IP addresses or come in at suspicious time intervals and so on. There are plenty of indicators that a review might be a bot.

That would be wrong but believable. I read some of the reviews, they did look very similar in ways beyond describing the same problems.

But I'm good with assuming malice, it seems like every company that takes action right now is unlikely to be doing it coincidentally. Maybe Google is doing it because of money somehow, hopefully it's an actual mistake that they'll fix. I suspect the former.

A fake review would be a review left by someone who is not a real user or customer. Thats almost impossible for google to work out but they would make it an aim to get as close as possible.

You want to try to avoid the mob jumping in on the reviews of something they never used because of some bad news.

Let X be the number of angry people who were affected by Robinhood's decision and let Y be the number of negative reviews left today, do you really think Y is greater than X here? If an app does a bad thing, it gets negative reviews. If an app does a really really bad thing, it gets a lot of negative reviews. What's so weird about that? Where is the "mob"?

But it's a free market and Google can do whatever they want lol. Don't you dare to say a bad word about them.

> They aren't that connected to Wall Street companies.

Lol. Sure they aren't.

Maybe, but Google are in a different league to these funds.

Google the corporation? Sure.

Many of the managers and workers at Google? Quite likely have a stake in what goes down on Wall Street.

That's more plausible but still relatively unlikely if you consider both how Google usually operate and who'd have clearance to pull the trigger if this is what is being suggested.

On balance, I really think this is just an automated system that's being conservative. Would you be in any way surprised that Google would have such a thing looking for big impulses in activity?

I doubt it. I'm at Facebook not Google but most of us employees are supporting the WSB side of this.

Most of the employees are not executives.

*Alphabet

My theory is something simpler: Play Store has anti-review-bombing mechanism. It simply kicks in in this case.

Unsure.

What I do know is that Google doesn't remove reviews for just anyone. They don't remove Play Store reviews and they do not remove Google Local reviews. Even if an app or a company is birdgaded due to bad news that is someone's opinion.

Hopefully, Google can 1) Send out something explaining their action and 2) Provide regular folks the ability to have reviews removed.

They don't like their platform being manipulated by organized downvoting. Not rocket science.

What does "manipulation" mean here, and why is it bad? What does "organized" mean here? I personally left a 1-star review detailing why I think the app deserves it before I heard anything about the review bombing. If a significant portion of it is "organized", why is that bad? You're making many large assumptions, not to mention framing them antagonistically ("not rocket science").

This is brigading - people were not reviewing the app (which the app rating is supposed to measure), but retaliating against a (valid) slight from Robinhood. Seen in that light, the recent mass voting is noise.

In this case their "slight" directly affected the functionality of the App: I was unable to buy or even view certain stocks. To me that is clearly App functionality that should be subject to user review and rating.

Mass shifts in public opinion due to actual changes in how the App behaves is not brigading nor retaliation and should not be protected against.

Whats the difference between the app and the service the app provides from the perspective of a user of the app?

There are multiple ways to access the Robinhood service. The service itself may be great (e.g. via website), but the app terrible (crashes, bad UI, slow, etc).

Manipulated?

I just gave a 1-star review on the iOS app store and am currently pulling all my money out of my RH account, because I don't like how RH is behaving.

People all thinking something is shit is not manipulation, its just collective agreement.

To play the Devil's advocate here, my personal intuition is that App reviews should be for how the apps perform, and shouldn't be used as proxy for reviewing those businesses. If the app is buggy or broken or whatever, it makes sense to give a low rating. I am not sure it makes equal sense if people suddenly realize they don't like the company who has made the app.

The functionality of the App and the policies and choices of the business are intrinsically tied. In this case their choice directly affected the functionality of the App: I was unable to buy or even view certain stocks. In my opinion that is, without a doubt, App functionality that should be subject to user review and rating.

It's one thing for the company to make choices that people disagree with but don't affect the actual functionality of the App. This could be environmental policies, partnering with a controversial government, using tax loopholes, etc. People going on brigades to review bomb an App for these types of issues are what should be protected against. Mass shifts in public opinion due to actual changes in how the App behaves should not be protected against.

If it is not letting you sell when you want to sell that’s a pretty shitty performance for a trading app. This is different from a subjective dislike of the parent company.

What if an app functions perfectly, but doesn't do what it promises? That's what seems to be happening here.

That's a fair point, and I agree with you – I hate it when reviews don't give me (the reader) an accurate picture of the experience I'll have with this app. Two problems though:

1. That's not how people treat reviews (people will leave a positive review if they love the business but the app is crap), so it's misleading to only enforce such an ideal here, with negative reviews.

2. In this case, the business effectively is the app, at least from the user's perspective. The app wouldn't let me even look at GME/AMC today, much less buy it. That's not what I want from a stock trading app, because it's an annoying experience that leaves a sour taste in my mouth, so 1-star it is.

xkcd #937. It's all great if the app isn't buggy, but if it doesn't do what it's advertised to do it deserves even more bad reviews.

I'm in the process of doing something similar. If you are as incensed as I am you might want to consider leaving a small amount of money < 1 USD in your account and opening an unused credit card with them.

Wait what does this do?

Presumably puts some burden on them? Like they have to maintain your credit card, review it once in a while, etc?

Google makes a lot of money from app developers. Perhaps they decided that the cost to them of angering app users by deleting negative reviews is less bad than the cost of app developers leaving their platform because Google won't protect their reputation (whether the negative ratings were deserved or not). App developers can watch this and rest easy that Google has their back in this (even if they don't on other things).

Google Play Store is a monopoly. Developers literally can't leave unless they want their android installs to decline by 99%.

You think Google, the 5th largest company in the world (by mkt cap), has no skin in the game when it comes maintaining the finance industry status quo?

Reasons Google would not want the financial status quo:

1. It tends to retard technical progress.

2. They have to make deals with entrenched incumbents to do finance.

3. There's nothing stopping a hedge fund manipulating Alphabet's stock.

Even if they do want to preserve the financial status quo, it's pretty difficult to see where the review score of a retail broker app fits in with that.

On the other hand avoiding review bombing is a Google Play store business objective, doing it in a half assed reactive way with an algorithm is Google's style, and of course it's also Google's style to not care about customer service nearly enough to wade into a debate about whether a pile on related to genuine upset with an app company's policy is really review bombing

Does Robinhood run on Google Cloud? If they aren’t this could be a move to try to get them to consider switching.

Keep in mind AWS is about to take on Twitter account and they took out Parler, an up and coming competitor overnight.

They don't like that apps on their store are being review bombed. That's really all it is.

Money. These people are fixing to lose to much, they'll pay their way out any way they can while they still can.

I get RH might be paying money to cleanup play store reviews, but how much is enough to justify the negative PR ?

There is another angle though - may be RH or some higher power is threatening to sue Google if they didn't help cleanup based on their own terms, which might have clause of active sabotage - I am sure they claim this is one such event.

That's not how these things work. Google is interested in the status quo. So much turmoil around digital platforms angering the owner class is bad for their business, more tech regulation etc. They don't want any drama, just fun and consumption.

RH didn't pay anything. Google knows what to do. The interests are way deeper than some pocket change moving around...