It seems like maybe the solution is not to remove reviews, but weight them somehow. 100k reviews left in 2 days probably shouldn't have the same weight as 100k reviews left over 2 years.

Or a more sophisticated version of this would be to somehow cluster reviews based on the particular issue they are reporting.

I think this is how Steam solved (or attempted to) with their store reviews. Now you can see two scores, the lifetime score and the recents score.

In an ideal situation the app should show the 4. lifetime stars and the 1. recent stars. A user will them immediately know something happened, and investigate on their own (whether the review bombing was for something they care about or not).

> 100k reviews left in 2 days probably shouldn't have the same weight as 100k reviews left over 2 years.

I'm not entirely sure I agree with this; let me offer another perspective and maybe you can talk through this with me and help me understand a little better. A review is an opportunity for a user to give their honest feedback to any prospective user and (incidentally) to the app developer(s), so a bunch of reviews bombing an app into oblivion has the potential to be wasteful and harmful (unauthentic negative ratings from competitors, like you mentioned). But on the other hand if Firefox mobile has average reviews and I don't leave any kind of review since I've been fairly satisfied with my experience with the app for the eight or so years I've been using android, then they release Firefox Daylight and completely ruin the experience for me, preventing me from doing things I've been able to do for years and fundamentally tanking the experience, should a five star review from 2017-18 be considered more relevant than my 2 star review from 2020? And the other thousands of 1 star reviews flooding in after the update? What if a company has a bad app, changes their process from waterfall to agile (sorry, had to inject a little humor here), overhauls their app, and gets a huge influx of positive reviews the same day as the release. Do the negative reviews left over time have more relevance than the positive reviews left after the update?

I'm not trying to take a position on what the right approach is, I'm hoping to understand a perspective that's different from mine :).

Or just you know let people express their views.

If people think the app is a good or bad experience they will say so.

Where did I suggest otherwise? My whole point was to let the reviews be, but figure out a way to make them useful. 100k reviews complaining about not being able to buy Gamestop is not useful.

right here:

>[reviews i dont like] probably shouldn't have the same weight as [reviews i do like].

You’re projecting. The comment didn’t say that. The intent of the commenter is being assumed, whether rightly or wrongly.

Robinhood can kick people off, block trading certain stocks to help big players, etc. All ordinary people can do is leave a bad review and you want to take even that away. Why?

Because spam isn't helpful to other ordinary people browsing the store.

Clarification: It did not prevent you from selling your holdings (ie. did not make you a bag holder). It only prevented you from opening a new position.

It prevented people that bought on margin from selling during tomorrow’s short squeeze, since it auto-liquidated their positions.

At the same time as it auto-liquidated the positions, it blocked attempts to purchase the liquidated stock.

One of their major investors directly benefited from the resulting market distortion.

Wouldn't you see a similar rise in app store reviews though? Seems like that wasn't the case?