(This is a stub reply so I can collapse the various comments responding to this, so as not to distract too much from the topic at hand. (Sorry, non-JS users.))
Given that they specifically introduced pagination to avoid issues caused by too-large single pages, probably yes. (tbh I would have passive-agressively made the "next" link 100px Comic Sans, but it's probably a good thing I'm not responsible for that)
How were these not overall real reviews? If they can't prove otherwise, this just entrenches the idea that big money is vastly more powerful than small voices. I honestly don't see how if this trend continues how things will end well. It's not just about Robinhood, etc, it's deplatforming, using AWS, etc as a weapon against smaller voices. I can't see this ending well.
Me neither. This month is crazy with very visible examples of blatant, unethical overreach of prominent companies. This thing absolutely adds up in people's consciousness. Sure, it decays over time, but right now, it adds up faster.
Given that 2021 is gearing up to become even weirder than 2020, it wouldn't surprise me if the next president was WallStreetBets' own /u/DeepFuckingValue...
He is the one that posted the initial GME due diligence (DD) last year. Started with 50k in stocks and options, was valued at 48 million yesterday and 33 today and been posting updates basically everyday recently [0]. He did cash out 13 million yesterday.
I don't know whether he orchestrated this or it grew out organically, but he's essentially the Jesus of WSB now. Most of what he seems to be doing is holding lots of GME and posting day-by-day updates (he lost some 14 million USD on GME yesterday, but is still millions in the positive) - but that galvanizes the community.
I believe if you go back in the user's posting history, he has posted screenshots of having a position in the stock over more than the past year--before the pandemic even started.
I think there are a couple of other recent presidential hopefuls who centered their messages much more around reducing the structural power of billionaires and large corporations.
And further, nobody outside of the extreme of the extremists actually wants to eliminate the potential for achieving a "wealthy" status. People will always be able to achieve high levels of success. The argument is that we need to pick a point where amassing so much wealth can start to be deemed anti social and start to taper things off there. There is basically nothing you can buy with ten or eleven digits that you can't buy with nine, except entire corporations and countries and absolutely no individual needs that power or the prospect of that power to be fulfilled in life.
> who centered their messages much more around reducing the structural power of billionaires and large corporations.
The problem is that there is a segment of the American voters who believe that if the current billionaires and large corporations would quit screwing them, they would become the billionaires and owners of the large corporations. As such they are all for screwing over the current crop of billionaires, but don’t want long lasting reduction in the structural power of billionaires.
I've heard it said that Americans all think they are potential millionaires and billionaires that have temporarily hit a down patch. That's why democratic socialism will never fly here except for isolated programs.
Reminds me of an article I keep in my bookmarks from a long time ago, which is probably still true today: 39% of Americans think they are in the top 1% or that they will one day be [1]. They don't want to be mean to the rich because they think they are rich or will soon be among them.
I expect pompeo or haley to feature prominently in that role in 2024 unless Trump himself screws things up for republicans by trying to make a comeback
Awful as Google is, I'd still trust it more than anything with Mercer's fingerprints on it. (Which is barely at all. But still.)
As for 2024 - it is obvious now that the only way the GOP can win another election is by dismantling democracy.
There is no chance whatsoever that the GOP can win again without wilfully disenfranchising tens of millions of voters. In spite of the bot mob on Twitter trying to create the impression there's some kind of enraged far right majority agitating for representation, the reality is the numbers just aren't there for a clean win.
So that is what is happening now. 2020 is the last chance for the far right, and they know that - which is why they intend to take the shot well before 2024.
>> As for 2024 - it is obvious now that the only way the GOP can win another election is by dismantling democracy.
I don't think that's true. There are plenty of moderates in the the swing sates that voted for Biden but would be more than willing to jump on the bandwagon for someone who is seen as a moderate conservative and making the right promises. The trick is getting that candidate through the primaries if the scene looks like 2016, where the hard hard right will gather around the one nut job, and the other 5 establishment republicans will be indistinguishable.
> The trick is getting that candidate through the primaries if the scene looks like 2016,
After Trumpists, tea partiers and evangelicals it will be interesting to see what happens next. The latter two groups seemed happy to align with trump despite not sharing their core values, maybe the trumpists will stick with whatever the next group is.
Pompeo is a clown who can't even Bangladesh or Ukraine and Haley is long in the tooth. The SD governor Noem has the superficial attractiveness and utter in(s)anity to capture the heart of US right-wingers though.
I think it's a tough decision to make. In general I understand that Google would prevent review bombing, since it can very easily be abused by social media mobs or competitors. The point of reviews is to give a genuine idea of how people on average like a given app. Reviem bombing completely distorts that, whether it be 1-star or 5-star reviews.
But here it's a pretty huge app, and the bombing is motivated by a real issue the users are having, so I think I agree with you that it was not necessarily the right decision.
As always the real problem is that tech giants are opaque in their behaviour. If we had clear guidelines for what constitutes "review bombing" there wouldn't really be an issue I think.
Not really. Many of people are rightfully upset and want to leave a 1 star review. It would be extremely inappropriate if Google removed my review.
I think the app sucks if they can just prevent you from trading a stock and make you the bagholder in favor of large investors. Seems like a legitimate concern that hundred thousands of other people share - not some organized random prank. People are losing money as we speak.
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 :).
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.
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?
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.
Completely unmoderated reviews would be awful, which suggests moderation is necessary. Moderation requires judgment, and different people have different ideas about what good judgment looks like. Your question made me think about what a "real review" is. Should the person have used the app for more than a certain period of time? Do they need to have taken certain actions (make an account?) Different folks will draw lines in different places because reviews are just opinions, and there are no real credentials for having an opinion. I don't see a way to resolve this with a centralized model.
Federated/distributed systems where the network is itself the filter seem more promising to me, even though they tend to come at the expense of usability.
why do scores need to be simple? why not simply graph satisfaction over time and allow for demarcations like number of hours used. trying to apply a roger ebert scoring system to products and services that are ephemeral and ever-changing is largely meaningless. whether review bombing is legitimate or not, it at least always has a cause and that cause should be considered highly relevant purchasing information.
I don't agree at all. I want to be able to rate an app that made it impossible to sign up with 1 star. Or that required access to my camera even though the app has nothing to do with taking photos or images. So, no time in but the app deserves IMO 1 star and potential customers should be notified to stay far away from the app
As for breaking apart reviews into categories that also has its problem. Zagat used to rate restaurants in 5 categories and it ended up requiring people to lie if they wanted to convey the message "do not go here".
Totally agree...ratings could be quite sophisticated. In the end, I suspect that sophisticated scoring system would still need to draw lines that some will disagree with, and we'd be back where we are now.
Sophisticated scoring might also bring common critiques, like ratings being biased or opaque (or just confusing). I recall Netflix had a issue when they made their star rating a prediction of what you would rate it (based on your previous viewing habits). It confused a lot of people who thought it was simply the average star rating. They since switched to percent-match as a result, and dropped star-reviews in favor of thumbs-up/thumbs-down.
Come to think of it, your suggestion may lead to something like percent-match for apps...though I suspect rating apps along dimensions the way Netflix does TV/movies may be tricky. Maybe different dimensions for different categories in the app store?
I'm still intrigued by a distributed approach that filters opinion through the sieve of the social network...I think it has more promise than centralized rating systems that attract abuse.
The internet has been going poorly for awhile. I don’t see how we’ll get off this track where the large crush and silence the small. I’m not sold on IPFS, GunDB, Zeronet, ect...
My guess is federated XMPP or RSS might be a few of the only vestiges of resilient organization. Even Matrix has signalled they’ll begin looking into deplatforming.
https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...
I read your Matrix link and it's not top-down deplatforming, it's user-driven moderation:
> What if we had a standard way to let users themselves build up and share their own views of whether other users, messages, rooms, servers etc. are obnoxious or not? What if you could visualise and choose which filters to apply to your view of Matrix?
The closest to actual deplatforming is:
> Admins running servers in particular jurisdictions then have the option to enforce whatever rules they need on their servers
But honestly, in a federated system I always assumed the server owners could do that. As long as it's not mandated from on high by the Matrix team, anyone can host whatever they want by setting up their own server.
Which deplatformings do you specifically refer to? The concern over them just seems way too tribal at the moment to be considered in league with the more serious allegations against Robinhood and the funds involved - that is big money.
Wrt Parler specifically, I think a lot of the "solutions" (or sketches toward) on this site would quickly reveal that the optimal societal configuration is closer to what we have now than one would expect - with or without S230.
Also, the wording of "using AWS" is almost libelously in need of a citation - who is doing it, and how do they have any sway over a company that is both absolutely enormous and not particularly woke?
> Which deplatformings do you specifically refer to?
President (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram), White House, Parler (Google Play, Apple, AWS), MyPillow guy, anyone who utters the phrase "stop the steal" on Facebook, Kyle Rittenhouse (Facebook, GoFundMe, Discover)
Wow, it's almost like private companies don't want to be seen supporting terrible people who have done terrible things, such as damage a democracy by incompetence and malice. Or encouraged and emboldened extremists cumulating in an attempt to actually harm the leaders of a country, or illegally obtain a gun, shot several people, then was seen associating with extremists who regularly call for and perpetrate violence.
Well those private companies wouldn't be seen as "supporting" anybody, if they behaved with any level of consistency and transparency. It is a problem of their own making, with every virtue signal further compounding expectations. I suspect that the majority of people you hate probably have phone numbers and receive mail, but I don't believe that AT&T and UPS "support" them - because those companies don't pull these stupid stunts. Debanking is starting to get normalized... and the new liberal battle cry is "private companies!"
> How were these not overall real reviews? If they can't prove otherwise, this just entrenches the idea that big money is vastly more powerful than small voices.
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
All of this very impressive, community, unpredictable, sentiment driven market has proven is that even the platform those cowboys and girls are trading on are owned.
Could a solution to this be a 3rd political party that unites people together somehow? Instead of fighting between democrats and republicans all the time.
OK. Is your third political party pro gun or anti gun? I need to know before I can commit... see the problem yet? We’ve been divided with wedge issues.
Big money? What big money exactly? Do you really think Google care about RH and its money? They do it to prevent organized activities of rating manipulation. The RH case might be justified but Google cannot be the judge. If tomorrow the corner store across the street receives 100K reviews in 1 hour, Google would respond in a similar way.
I don't see any overlap between Google's executive board and Robinhood, but it's a small world among power players at that level. Someone could have called in a favor (or been trying to curry one).
Without more information, it's hard to say whether this was a good faith move by Google, reflexive algorithmic moderation, or another example of American extractionalism.
Please, some common sense. Google is one of the wealthist and powerful companies in the world. RH is one app out of millions in their play store. No one at Google is stupid enough to do RH a favor. It's not the first time nor the last time they do something like like this. Their tos doesn't allow rating manipulation, which clearly happened here. They don't care if it justified or not.
All the insane conspiracy theories floating around, by people who mostly have no idea how trading/margin works, that this is just mean ol’ hedge funds trying to screw the little guy... I’m suddenly afraid of Trump 2.0, except he or she is gonna be a lot more competent and brutal. Jan 6 was just the warmup.
There is so much wrath, envy, and greed out there, and so much willingness to believe whatever fits one’s preconceived notions of how the world works.
But the giant hedge funds and billionaires aren't corrupt at all and we should all just believe them?
Get real, most economic theory is all nonsense to cover for corruption and insider trading. Everyone can see how bad the economic inequality is getting, greed is mainly from the rich side, not from the so-called "conspiracy theorists"
Exactly! Today I saw a clip at the top of Reddit of a CNBC clip that was clearly manipulated to generate outrage, but only one person out of thousands even mentioned it in the comments
I mean, "this user never even downloaded this app" and "it got 100000% more reviews today than any other day" is probably a decent enough heuristic for removing fake reviews.
> this just entrenches the idea that big money is vastly more powerful than small voices.
An “idea”? It’s like saying there is an entrenched idea that the Earth goes around the Sun.
The political class tried everything in the book to divide this nation. And in just one day, at least among the “retarded”, there is unity. No wonder they are all coming out of the woodwork to claim support for the retards. They are worried.
>> it will likely end with ordinary people being really cynical about the motives of big tech, the financial services industry, the media, and the ruling class generally.
That's how things were from the 70s up until the internet boom.
It's going to take another paradim shift before the cynicism errodes.
> That's not how it ends, that cuts off the story halfway through.
I think the end point is one of:
- America comes to its senses, reforms, and becomes democratic
- America becomes a China-like oligarchy and police state, with ubiquitous surveillance, and a big-tech-run social credit system to keep everyone in line
- America bumbles along is the same fashion it has been doing, with things slowly deteriorating
My company has been scraping the apple app store and google play store using private reverse engineered api. We provide a wide range of services around those data which include reviews and ratings historical analysis and so on.
I can confirm that the displayed rating on both stores is exactly the weighted average of valid reviews and ratings posted by users. No trickery there.
The only caveat here is that both platform regularly invalidate posted reviews and ratings for various reasons (the user asked for it to be removed, apple/google has reasons to believe it was fraudulent/automated, ...). If a review/rating is removed, it won't be shown and won't be taken into account in the calculation.
So the calculation is really along the lines of :
> SELECT app, AVG(stars) AS display_stars FROM customer_reviews WHERE deleted=false GROUP BY app;
This is not how most stores calculate the rating. Not Apple's, not Amazon's, and not Google's. They all have various "leans" on the score, that factor in other things besides just total_score divided by num_reviews.
I'm pretty sure it is, with the addition that when they detect brigading of the rating in a certain time interval, they remove ratings made in that time interval.
They will probably reenable ratings for the Robinhood app when things calm down, so if you want to give it a 1 star rating just wait a few weeks and try not to forget about it.
But that's why there's no real need for manipulation. App store what highly rated apps and app makers want their apps to be highly rated so they use more or less dark patterns and incentives to incite users to leave good reviews.
There's a massive selection bias at play which tends to naturally inflate review scores without any explicit fudging.
I thought that at first, until I considered that user ratings might not actually map all that well to things like how long they spend in the apps, how likely spending time in an app is to increase their time spent in the store or on their device overall, and/or how much money they spend in these places.
> it's deplatforming, using AWS as a weapon against smaller voices. I can't see this ending well.
This, so much - imagine you believe "they" stole the election, "they" got your favorite social media shut down (parler/gab/whatever), "they" blocked the buying of options, "they" then liquidated your position as the price predictably fail and you got margin called, you complained but "they" got your feedback deleted. Ouch.
I can't see this ending well at all. The executive will have to be extremely careful with what they will enact. The climate was already tense, but this is making it explosive.
I'd be extremely careful for all my 2021 forecast.
The point is that a widely perceived conflation will have material effects on the involved organizations and that the conflation will spread to new organizations with each new incident.
I've been using Android for over a decade now I believe. Have only reviewed a handful of apps and generally been a good citizen. I left a thoughtful one star review today and it was deleted. I'm not going to lie, it irks me.
customer reviews aren't really a 'democracy'. They're supposed to be authentic and reflect the overall quality of the app to the general user.
A horde of outraged users bombarding the app even though most people won't care about this particular event distorts the rating comparable to disappointed TV viewers bombing imdb. It ruins the utility for everyone else.
I think the review is meant to reflect the entire product, not just the app. That includes robinhood's service, they're not separate. And robinhood passed a lot of people off by restricting the buying of certain stock. The backlash is warranted
Sadly for me a lot of the apps I've made I'm pretty happy with are filled with reviews that basically say "Sally in customer service was mean, 1 star".
That is part of the customer experience. If Google / Apple really wanted to, they could give more than one dimenion to score on. For example, a five star rating for app quality, fun, and customer service.
That they don't shouldn't preclude customers from rating the entire experience.
That's how reviews are supposed to function. If the users are outraged at the app for what they feel was wrong behavior by the app and it's associated service, they are entitled to it. Just as I am entitled to leave a glowing review if the issue does not affect me.
Every product has a defect rate and outraged customers are the most likely to post reviews. Therefore a product is likely to have an overrepresented proportion of negative reviews. This is a tricky problem to correct for. I'm thinking about this more in terms of Amazon reviews, where they perhaps factor in the rate of returns when deciding what and how many reviews to delete.
When I shop for products on Amazon the problem is such that more or less all reviews are negative. In that case it doesn't matter if it's 1k or 10k, they simply drown out the positive/neutral reviews, even though I'm pretty safe to ignore the "this product was DOA" reviews. The review incentive structure is fundamentally broken.
eh - you can actually read all the reviews by rating...
if you feel only 3 star reviews are valuable, amazon lets you read just the 3 star reviews. If stuff is being 'drowned out' its because your trying to read all 500 pages of reviews?
To me, a much bigger problem is the fact that reviews on amazon are for totally different products then whats being sold (Sellers 'recycle' pages and change the product being sold - allowing them to keep the reviews and ratings)
So basically - I have to read the reviews 'most recent' first anyway..
The way this is fixed is by surveying customers and asking for reviews. Being involved in a customer service software Saas, I learned that for most companies, 80%+ of the interactions/transactions with customers are positive. But as you say, most people won’t leave a review - unless you ask them and make it easy for them to leave it. It also helps if you ask them to review a specific person (so they feel like they are helping someone).
What Google Play has done is not the right way to fix the ratio of positive to negative reviews, especially given the issue at hand. It also should be RH the one fixing its own reviews by addressing the problem with its user base.
> Every product has a defect rate and outraged customers are the most likely to post reviews. Therefore a product is likely to have an overrepresented proportion of negative reviews.
If I buy a product or a service, and it is defective or not what what was promised or not upto mark, I have the right to complain about it. Shutting down my valid complains because it would create an overrepresented proportion of negative reviews is downright wrong.
It's "wrong" in the sense that you go unheard but "right" in the sense that I can make a more accurate assessment of the product. I care more about the latter and so does the sales platform.
This energetic response from so many huge players even outside of WS have really elevated this meme stock saga to a monumental art piece.
Another interesting aspect is the back-and-forward. Reddit throttled and seem to have restored the sub. Discord reversed the ban. FB & Google jumped in.
Not to mention all the WS action, obviously. Financial press started with an emphatically anti-WSB position but public opinion and regular media went sharply in the other direction. I suspect tomorrow's press will be quite different.
WSB nutters believe they have withstood an day of coordinated market manipulation efforts. They're very pumped for round 2. Meanwhile, it seems like brokers, clearing houses, market makers and the markets are getting ready to reopen trading again.
The whole thing has become symbolic, and that might mean even more demand tomorrow.
chances are if you were leaving a review on the app on today of all possible days, and a one star one at that, it was most likely a knee jerk reaction to the company policy change (which they were basically forced to do) and not the app, and not a thoughtful one.
You'd do better to phrase this as a question. If you are willing to assume bad faith on an impression alone people will likely do the same for you, i just did.
Phrasing as a question means you aren't making the assumption and gives op a chance to make a good faith response, which is usually more constructive.
In effect, it was. The stock was out there, but RH didn't have the cash in the right account to move it so you could buy it. If Amazon doesn't let me buy black socks for one day, it doesn't mean there are no black socks anywhere in the world.
Say you went to a restaurant on a day when their lettuce had salmonella and a bunch of people got sick and angry and then left 1* reviews on Yelp. Would you take them all down for the same reason?
Honest question: why does Google care here? They don't really have a stake in the GME situation, with no short or long positions (I'm assuming). They aren't that connected to Wall Street companies. Why protect Robinhood at all?
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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
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...
> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
You're being downvoted, but you're not really wrong. It might present differently, but the reality is that the government and large, powerful corporations are separate entities more or less in name only.
If the interests of a large corporation serves the interest of the people in the government, they'll move every lever of government they can to support the corporation, and vice versa. That's basically exactly what the fascism you describe intended and attempted.
I'm assuming you're trying to corner a point of "You cannot cite a specific law because it doesn't exist" without outright saying it.
It seems plain that, at best, Robinhood has violated its fiduciary, and at worst manipulated the market. This is one of those things I've come to understand as being illegal in the same way that I know insider trading is illegal. No, I cannot cite which law makes insider trading illegal.
Maybe you're right and there is no law. I personally don't have the time or experience to go digging through legal text to treat HN like an official courthouse. We will know by the results of the lawsuits, or by a video from the Legal Eagle on YouTube.
Insider trading is illegal. And I think what robinhood did should be /unless they explicitly stated they could do so in their terms and people went in with eyes wide open/.
I imagine it is, as it seems pretty close to market manipulation, I just want to be careful and understand what’s really going on.
Besides, along with individuals or corporations we should be going after the fed who really manipulates markets and steals from the poor. End the fed.
RH's terms don't overwrite laws and regulations. It is very tightly regulated what organizations like RH are allowed to do and they don't set their own rules.
The fed argument is really nuanced and difficult. They absolutely manipulate but not all manipulation has to be bad.
There is some kind of revolution coming. The big catalysts are things like censorship on social media and wall st changing the rules on the retail investors.
But actions like these only mount the problems. Why on earth would google remove these reviews? What Robinhood has done this week is an extremely reviewable act.
The Google play store managers and/or their bosses probably have their hands deep in it. It'd be interesting to see what a real investigation into this produces.
I have little to no interest in any stock market, but everything that's happening around r/wallstreetbets right now is nothing short of fascinating. Almost seems like a domino effect, revealing step by step how much control these companies have, at least beyond the tech sphere[1], and how interconnected they are.
I mean, not that I'm really surprised by this happening with Google[2], but still I didn't expect them to get involved; don't see what they have to gain by this other than sharing on the bad publicity. Wonder if Apple will step in too.
Hopefully these events will actually lead into more adoption of decentralized protocols and platforms (and more support for open hardware development, maybe), and I'm starting to wonder if this week will go into the history books.
[1]: I mean to say that I know that many in the tech sector were already aware of it. But everyone at large was just kind of okay with it, so this is revelatory from that perspective. Well, hopefully it is.
[2]: In fact, this was probably caused by the surge in activity triggering one of their (in)famously intransigent algorithms, which never seem to stop increasing in number.
What triggered Alphabet to suddenly get involved? I'm assuming that these reviews didn't appear recently, suddenly or something.
Discord shuts down WallStreetBets and reddit throttle them.. both for hate speech. Suddenly, simultaneously and coincidentally during their maneuver.
The CEO of the NASDAQ rushes to a camera calling for SEC scrutiny and tightening regulation, wearing a look of disbelief on her own face. Financial press have a meltdown in the opposite direction of regular reporters. No laws seem to have been broken.
Now google happen to be doing something with the RH app? WTF! This whole thing is saucier than soup.
> What triggered Alphabet to suddenly get involved? I'm assuming that these reviews didn't appear recently, suddenly or something.
They did appear recently. The latest pre-today copy of the page at archive.org [1] had it at 166469 reviews (average a tad over 4 stars). That was from 2020-11-17.
The next copy there was at 14:06 today (2021-01-28) [2]. It's up to 196808 reviews (average 2.5 stars). They captured it several mores times today. Here's a table.
If we play it safe and assume that all the reviews as of 14:06 today were old reviews, there was a minimum of 133840 reviews today, which would have been 40% of the total reviews. More realistically, if we go with about 170k old reviews, it's more like 160k reviews today representing almost 50% of all reviews.
Or, just possibly, a hundred thousand one star reviews in one day trigger some sort of automated spam system and not everything is the work of shadowy big financial institutes?
If that's the case, then the spam system is at fault and needs fixing. Actual users should be able to leave actual reviews about the app's actual behavior without being flagged as spam. As long as they're not violating other terms like vulgarity or whatever, those reviews are valid and removing them means the system is doing the wrong thing.
Question: I gave a 1 star review on AppStore and when looking at it again it appears like I didnt give a review at all? Can someone else confirm- is this the same for others? So you just cant leave a 1 star review (it says thanks for feedback though)
Is it not market manipulation when you can control (a mojority in this case) buyers actions ?
My belief is they wouldn't take action blocking trades without their intermediary influencing.. It makes no difference to them otherwise.
So who is RH's intermediary?
I couldn't find from a brief google search but I am curious how and why this occurred when it looks like such a bad move for RH. Especially with rumours of them wanting to move for an IPO themselves.
1) Something happened here, either they didn't have capacity tech wise, which is a legit concern. - I haven't heard that being the reason yet.
2) Their intermediary blocked their trades, and so they got cucked, can't think of a better expression.
3) Someone told them to slow that squeeze down - This is probably the most UNLIKELY, but the one that everyone wants to jump to.
We might find out why, but really in the end it doesn't matter.. WSB and co has proven, the market is as strong as the confidence people give it.
Lies propogate when money is involved, shorting +20% is considered risk, +100%.. I'm sorry but I personally don't have sympathy. Infact, I appreciate when it's caled out.
I'd rather not bail out any more banks for bad practices that might be legal purely because they haven't had a light shone on them.
I do worry about the losers in this all though, and it's not the people with money. If you're in this deep, rent money deep, get out. It's a good fight, but there is no unsung hero reward on this one. If you have money, pump that to pluto idk.
Moderating obvious brigading is standard practice. Huge influxes of retaliatory negative reviews in reaction to external events aren't considered very genuine. I don't think Robinhood is getting any special treatment from Google here.
My point is related to the general consensus of HN over the past few weeks giving a pass to companies (Twitter/AWS/Facebook/etc) for taking extreme partisan political actions (e.g. banning Trump from Twitter, shutting down Parlor, etc).
The generic response was "if you don't like how they handled it, you can build your own platform". So now I'm gauging if that statement still holds when the situation doesn't cut across political lines...i.e. why is no one saying "if you don't like it, go build your own Google/Robinhood".
I think the answer is that since it's no longer a partisan-political issue, HN wants to treat the situation differently and forget what they said over the past few weeks.
I didn't actually get that vibe from a comment about being run by bots. Not like the parents said "its all the bots fault".
But, for what its worth - I think "if you don't like it - lump it" still holds. There are other systems with zero commissions beside RobinHood. For instance, I didn't notice Fidelity stopping any trades the couple of times I spot checked today.
Responsibility for what, exactly? They don't have a responsibility to publish any particular review in the store. They're free to include/exclude/weight the data they receive to give you star ratings for apps in any way they'd like. Vote clumps like this one tend to make star ratings less trustworthy as a measure of the true quality of an app, so I'd expect an app store operator to discount them.
Fair enough. There's a tension here between integrity and usefulness that is interesting, though. If I were to put myself into their shoes I'd be hesitant to commit to a specific public-facing policy for filtering ratings and reviews, though.
Same thing happened for tiktok in India. When people are posting reviews that call out actual grievances suddenly these are "fake reviews". But everybody justifies such actions by Google/Apple saying they have a right to allow/disallow whatever they want on their platform, no obligation at all.
First they came for us, and you didn't speak out. Now they are coming for you.
It might look like it from 100,000 foot view, however a bottom's up approach would show that there are millions, if not tens of millions, of people quite aware of Robinhood's shenanigans and are pissed off about it - enough to leave a review.
WSB has over 5 million subscribers right now (up 1 million from yesterday alone) and some threads get over 100,000 comments on a single thread. I don't find it hard to believe that a 100k Android users got angry enough with Robinhood to leave a negative review.
There are over 5 million subscribers to /r/wallstreetbets as of right now. The majority of them joined this week. 2% of them voting on the app doesn't sound like bot spam to me.
Legit reviews and bot spam both sound like plausible explanations. I'm sure Google has the server logs to figure that out with reasonable certainty, but unfortunately we don't.
Right now, the link shows 4 stars and 180,526 reviews. Few hours ago, when I became aware that /r/wallstreetbets are talking about Robing Hood's app, I took a look at that same page out of curiosity. It clocked around 250,000 reviews, with overall rating of 1 star.
It's still sitting at 4.7 stars on the iOS app store as well, with few 1 star reviews visible. I wonder if they have a queue that reviews have to sit in before they start showing up publicly.
Apple reporting is significantly delayed, always has been, seems like 24-48 hours. They seem to to do more batching than realtime with reporting.
Tomorrow may be more interesting, or not, if they choose to delete activity from today.
For what its worth I edited my previous 4 star review to a 1 star today and it seems to still be active. But rating the app as 1 star is not enough. We need to take our money out of Robinhood even if we end up having to pay a few dollars per trade. Also I have not made any plays on gme or the other stocks and I would not recommend anyone else do so but this type of market manipulation is unacceptable and needs to be punished.
So, if a free-to-use app suddenly becomes pay-to-use and all users lose their access to their data unless they pay (similar to an app getting malware but in a legal way), and then those users review with 1 stars...Google will remove those reviews?
This is dangerous. I remember some cases where an app suddenly changes owner and adds ads and other unwanted features. What happened in those other cases?
I always thought of app reviews as being reviews of the applications... not of the companies or services behind them. So it's kind of jarring for me to see the app taking a hit when it's the service people have a complaint about. The app didn't misbehave, right? It's not like a different app interfacing with Robinhood would've worked any better. So while I don't particularly like what they're doing, I think I can understand it if this is their motivation for removing these reviews.
Edit:
Never mind—it turns out Google literally says "Your reviews should reflect the experience you've had with the content or service you're reviewing."... apparently they do want you to review the service... or at least at some point they thought they did. Pretty confusing to see how they're dealing with this now, if they truly want that.
You're correct. But it's also useless without the service provider, and the store specifically asked me if the app was good at trading stocks, linking bank accounts, tracking stocks.
If we stick with your perspective, no, it's not. It's a pointless app without the service it consumes. And today the service frustrated a bunch of its core users.
A good rating on the play store serves as advertising. It helps the app creator, and in this case the service provider, gain customers and make money. They probably should be penalized heavily for the way their users experienced service degradations today that made the application useless.
> But it's also useless without the service provider, and the store specifically asked me if the app was good at trading stocks, linking bank accounts, tracking stocks.
This confirms what I said though. You tell the store "this app isn't good at trading stocks" because "GME was made unavailable for trading"? For that logic to follow, it would mean the app misled you or confused you when GME wasn't available for trading. But that's obviously not what happened here. Blaming it on the app for this seems very much like blaming your bus driver because the transit company changed the schedule.
We aren't saying "this app isn't good at trading stocks"
We're saying this company is not good at trading stocks.
The review section should be an honest forum for the app and the service the company can provide through the app. Do you really expect the common person to point out if the app made followed the fundamentals of UI/UX design? The review is to express users' experience, which can involve poor app design and/or poor service.
> Do you really expect the common person to point out if the app made followed the fundamentals of UI/UX design?
What? No. I expect them to say "it looked like my GME orders were submitted, but I don't see them going through", or things like that, if such problems existed. You don't need to be a UX expert to review a poor UX. But when the store asks you "is this app good at trading stocks" and you say "no it's awful, and I'm also not saying this app isn't good at trading stocks", you're not answering the question they're asking.
The app exists to provide you a service. You only have the app installed at all to use the service. When the service sucks 1 star is entirely reasonable. It's not a review of the developers effort. It's a review of using Robinhood with the app. If people hate it, that's their right, surely?
Good on Google for making it utterly clear how dishonest they are. They're facing new monopoly regulation, how does this buy them political favor?
A user can't be expected to know where the line is between "working as intended" and "misbehaving". A user can't be expected to know what is the fault of the app's implementation, and what is the fault of "the service" behind the app. Even at their most restrained, users review the user experience.
> A user can't be expected to know where the line is between "working as intended" and "misbehaving".
Sure they can. RH even blasted out messages through the app telling people exactly what is going on, and what they can and cannot do. Nothing I'm aware of confusing about it, certainly nothing that caused people to give this rating. I don't think people are dumb enough to not understand the difference between "this app is broken" and "I was forbidden from trading GME" with all the indications that were shown on the UI.
Speaking for myself I perceive the app rating as a conglomeration of possible perceptions. On what that rating might reflect. You state it should reflect the apps functionality, but I feel that an App that doesn't do what I want, intuitively, is not a good app. Some rate it high because the font is so lovely. I think in the end a one dimensional numbers falls short to describe the plethora of thoughts that go into creating a rating, that can be given on a whim.
For this app, it is inseparable from the services it provides, they are one and the same.
Edit: imagine reviewing the Instagram app, but doing it only as a review of the app part and not of the service too? If Instagram is likely to lose your data, or otherwise misbehave, and its not the app code but the service itself, it still has a big impact on the app experience. I can't think of a single app review that's only based on the app code, everything is also about what the app lets you do, the services attached to it.
How though? The website behaved the same way. By that logic it would be impossible to review the website? And it's not like it's hard to imagine an app with a worse interface in front of the same service. A worse app for the service should receive a lower rating, right?
You can't use the app for anything except this one service. If you're not reviewing the service itself at the same time, what's the point of reviewing the app?
You're reviewing how good of a UX the app has for the underlying service, as I see it. Because it's very easy to imagine a great stock broker with an awful UX. By your logic all variations of Facebook Messenger (like Lite, etc.) should receive the same rating? Surely that doesn't make sense?
Doesn't make sense to review only UX part of the app or any other part of the app. For me the review should include the whole experience the app gives.
Yes I would expect Facebook Messenger app review to include the facebook messenger service experience.
Would you say the same thing if it was a 3rd party developer writing the app? Someone like yourself who's just trying to put a better app in front of Robinhood? Would they deserve blame for this too?
That seems so unreasonable to me. What could that person's app have possibly done better to receive a better rating?! Do you blame people who are doing the best any human can do in their position when they have absolutely no control over anything?
That's so terrible. But thanks for sharing. I guess now I see how we end up driving good people out of positions of power and leave worse ones to fill their vacuums.
> Do you blame people who are doing the best any human can do in their position when they have absolutely no control over anything?
If someone advertises a service but cannot provide that service due to ineptitude, mendacity, or bad luck, then they will be almost certainly be judged on that regardless of their efforts. Their efforts may or may not be taken in to account but this is not school, we are adults, and as such we are all judged based on performance before all other considerations.
For those who wish it to be otherwise then that's fine, just don't charge.
You're confusing what I'm saying. I'm not talking about grading on effort, I'm talking about grading on achievement. Nobody was talking about how much effort went into the app. While I would guess it might've been a lot, I have no clue and I don't care. The question was, do you grade them on what they achieved, or on what someone else achieved on something else that they had no influence over, but which they clearly had no choice but to depend on... regardless of how much effort did or didn't go into their work.
In this case, RH's actions negatively impacted the service which their users depend on. The app is an interface for that service. It's common for app reviews to be influenced by the quality of the backend service.
If Spotify purged many popular musicians from their library, I'd expect app reviews to reflect that even if the app itself is still fine on a technical level.
It would be easy to seperate the reviews for providers and apps. Google doesn't do that.
Same for Amazon. Very often bad reviews are for the seller or the packaging or the time for delivery. Then there are discussions from people who tell other people to review the product not the seller and on it goes. Amazon could have split - with ML I think they still could - the reviews and the seller in a way that satisfies users (seller reviews are much harder to find and not accessible at the point of product review).
Yeah, this is basically the same situation. I confess this has always been perplexing for me too. I don't understand how people can give poor ratings to a seller when they don't like a product. It's clear as day to me what each review is intended for, but apparently not to everyone?
Users review products/services based on "Did it fill my needs". They really don't care if it was useless because the app sucked, or the company sucked. They just leave a review saying "this sucked". If you're lucky, they leave enough info. about why it sucked, to see if it matters to you.
Did anyone actually think that online ratings represent anything meaningful?
It's numbers in a database controlled by the seller who makes more money if the numbers are better. My insight that it's all fake came when I tried to purchase a baby carrier on Amazon and found a product with hundreds of 5 star reviews, but all the pictures were teenagers with their plush toys...
I like the guy but I disagree with his fatalism. If we managed as human beings to curtail what was considered normal for millennia, to wit slave trade, we can also make things way better.
We need to start by making it illegal to be a billionaire.
Taxes. I think most human beings can survive with 100 millions of dollars of wealth (it's more than one can spend in multiple lifetimes). Anything over that can just be taxed.
The problem of letting any private entities get that rich is they start to take control of everything.
One such example is The East India Company having at one point a bigger private army than the British Army[0].
Except the politicians will take that extra tax money and use it to bail out banks and wall street and spend it on shit that no one needs and impose policies that no one cares about and continue the corruption cycle, only now with a lot more money than they had before. We should trust the government a lot less, not more, with our hard earned dollars.
Greed is part of the human nature, and people in the government are no exception.
70% top marginal tax rate on incoming over $10M in a year.
Then it wouldn't be illegal to be a billionaire, but it would be much harder, and would mean you were constantly contributing a significant amount back to society if you're able to maintain that level of wealth.
They could sell stock—maintaining the total size of the company but losing some control over it, in order to pay taxes.
Alternatively, they could reduce the size of the company by having the company issue dividends on the stock to shareholders, in an amount enough to cover taxes.
The same way the IRS conducts income assessments. Some additional forms that you have to fill out declaring your wealth at tax-time.
For the vast majority of people you could add a form on the IRS-1040 that is a single check box.
"Check this box if you have less than $100,000,000 in total assets". If you have more than $100,000,000 in assets, then you have to fill out an additional schedule(s) detailing your assets.
If your assets are over $200,000,000 then you're taxed on your assets that exceed that amount.
> Now that you have figured out the legality of your position
I actually am not 100% convinced of the legality of the wealth tax. I think we've figured out the practicalities of it. I think it may be an open question as to whether a wealth tax is presently constitutional.
I don't think it's obviously unconstitutional, but I also don't think it's obviously constitutional.
> why is this moral to do?
I'll play if you will. First, you explain the moral position of allowing people to starve, and to die of the elements when others have more money than they could ever spend in their lifetime.
Once you explain the morality of a national with the resources such as ours allowing people to die in the elements, then I'll go ahead and take a pass at the morality of the wealth tax.
Which is to say: I think it is immoral not to have such a tax.
Someone on /r/latestagecapitalism pointed out if you seized everyone's excess billions above $1B, you could end world hunger for 216 years, end climate change by 2030, etc etc.
Around 7.5 billion people on earth would probably agree to those benefits.
Nothing to see here, but I can't delete this post. tl;dr I got excited because I couldn't see the RH app returned in a play store search, even though I could see the app via a direct link. A commenter has pointed out that this is because the app isn't available where I am, in the UK. Sorry for the fuss.
----------------------------------------
I've just posted the comment below in a dupe of this post [0], but am keen to see whether anyone else can reproduce my result:
Top results include Trading 212, Webull, eToro and others - and the page goes on for quite a while (Coinbase, Bamboo, etc) before eventually ending up with kids' cartoon Robin Hood games.
The Robinhood app itself hasn't been displayed. Can anyone else confirm this?
Edit to add: Just tried searching using the suggestion [1] that came up after I typed the word "robinhood" into the query box - which was "robinhood trading app uk" - and chose that. I thought that perhaps there was some georestricted stuff going on. But no: I scrolled to the end and the Robinhood app was not listed.
Further edit to add that I followed the link given in this post, which took me to the RH app page with its (remaining) reviews, and then copied the title of the app as given "Robinhood - Investment & Trading, Commission-free", and pasted it into the search box.
Some apps are region-locked. It doesn't show up in my search either, but if I manually go to its play store page [0] it states "This app is not available for your device". Blocking apps you can't use from search isn't that unexpected.
Yes, you are right. It was pointed out to me elsewhere that it's not available in the UK, which is where I am. I was searching via desktop, and didn't get the "not available for your device" message on the app's page, but did get an "add to wishlist".
So, thanks once again. No mystery here after all :-(
We must be watching a budget 1 star movie. In the first half of the movie, the action takes place in a casino. Players have figured how to win the rigged game and the casino is losing big money. Managers have to drop the pretense they follow the rules.
I wonder if the next phase of the internet is for groups of heck, 100000, maybe 1M or even 100M people to organize to take things down permanently. Maybe right now it's like baby steps, but what happens in a year?
The WSB debacle gained momentum because everyone thought they were going to get rich in the process.
I think people are going to become very disillusioned when they realize how much of the information posted to WSB was misinformation. WSB removes posts and comments that don't toe the line that everyone needs to buy and hold GME. Meanwhile, the only way to profit from this trade is to sell at exactly the right time, before everyone else does.
There will also be a lot of frustration and disappointment when various hedge funds announce how they made record profits on the Gamestop frenzy. Some will suffer, of course, but others will make billions.
Finally, living in a world where frenzied crowds conspire to take out services based on shared misunderstandings will not make for great outcomes.
> WSB removes posts and comments that don't toe the line that everyone needs to buy and hold GME
WSB allows both sides of the conversation, but because users have become especially dogmatic recently, any opinion that runs counter to the narrative gets downvoted.
have they acknowledged this? how can they justify it? are we should it's google and not robinhood somehow? IIRC, the iOS App Store allows developers some control over how ratings are presented (i.e. by allowing them the option to reset ratings when uploading a new version)
It's not possible for an app publisher to delete reviews.
However, in the Google Play Console, as an app publisher you can flag comments as against the Google ToS, about 100 per day maximum and then the reviews go through moderation at Google.
Here, it's more like a bulk deletion was done (certainly manual action) and I doubt it's just one single moderator taking action to delete 100k+ reviews.
Rotten Tomatoes has pulled the same shenanigans before when a "this was supposed to be popular!" movie ended up with poor ratings from mere users. If anything, the lack of kickback to them has only emboldened moves like this one.
Google is a company and not obligated to let anybody post any kind of review on their platform. This is a non-issue. Whoever doesn't like can build their own play store, android os, and smartphone. No need to whine.
Where did you live 10 years ago that wasn't run by corporate greed and corruption, or were you just too young to remember it?
If anything, things are better now than they were 10 years ago, and things were even worse 10 years before that. One reason that things are getting better is that more people are paying attention, which makes that fun paradox where a bunch of people who are new to this whole thing perceive the world as getting worse.
I think the general attitude was not that these people are conspiracy theorists and making these things up but that there response would be something like "Why does it matter, how does it affect me?" and the answer would have been some theoretical bad thing that the average person can't imagine happening to themselves. Now its happening which makes it real for people.
> If anything, things are better now than they were 10 years ago, and things were even worse 10 years before that
While things are truly better in certain aspects, the percentage of people relying on these companies now - as opposed to then - makes up for the less bad-ness.
Very curious what specifically makes you see things as less corrupt or people as paying more attention. The CARES Act was as bad as anything passed during the financial crisis and sailed through Congress with nary a word of objection or media scrutiny.
Is there a specific metric you're thinking of? My understanding is that income inequality is at an all-time high, and I'd be very surprised if it were worse 10 and 20 years ago.
I was mostly speaking in terms of corporate crime/greed and the general public's willingness to let it slide, which is admittedly a pretty hard thing to quantify.
"Morality police" was once a 80's or 90's trope or meme against the religious right coming from the left. Now, those with interest in policing morality from a leftward slant and those with special interests at other entrenched mega-corps have both found nearly unlimited use of puppet strings at SV firms to wield their power with frightening alacrity.
"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."
- George Orwell, "1984"
Stallman, like most of us (and nearly all prominent historical figures) can posses both positive and negative traits simultaneously. The good isn't always outweighed by the bad, and vice versa.
I think this isn't doublethink at all. I agree on the latter point.
In some contexts you do have to consider both, i.e. there are some loonies in every corner but the actual philosophy behind cancel-culture isn't necessarily a bad one of it wasn't the focal point of an extremely violent culture war and being aggressively pumped by social media not designed to encourage introspection or even basic humanity in its participants.
I think it’s more likely emergent behavior born of individual executives making decisions that benefit their image and career, rather than some conspiracy. Having a diverse team looks good and deflects the political eye of Sauron from the largely white male upper management types, who are de-facto racists/sexists/etc in the pop culture lens. Who knows, maybe some of them genuinely believe that preferential hiring of diverse candidates is actually morally righteous.
> I think it’s more likely emergent behavior born of individual executives making decisions that benefit their image and career, rather than some conspiracy.
As a (very!) low level manager, I’ve been espousing that diversity prevents groupthink for years. If we have too much groupthink, we risk driving off a cliff, high-fiving each other the whole way down.
Ideological diversity prevents group think. The modern "diversity and inclusion" movement actually strictly enforced a procrustean ideological homogeneity, ironically. It's probably the biggest modern example of group think.
Every time my company does a push for diversity, they hire the same kind of people - middle to upper middle class, college educated, comfortable to well-off suburban upbringing.
The effect is measured to exist, but any attempt at explanation is just conjecture. That said, it seems pretty clear to me that racially homogenous groups tend to have closer social ties and are therefore more likely to unionize.
Generally speaking, regardless of race and sex, upper management types tend to be sociopaths who are actually racist/sexist (see all the scandals about this every time an executive sexually harrasses someone). Embracing the idea of a "diverse workforce" is a great deflection tactic.
The mega corps are driving the wedge between the blue collar working class and the white collar working class. Should the two groups ever unite they would tear the mega corps back into a pile of tiny toothless startups, and that’s against all moneyed interests.
Not only that but this "diversity over meritocracy" doesn't apply to Asian Americans, especially in academia, medical, law professions, entertainment etc.
It's like there is two classes of minorities: Asians vs Non-Asians and the diversity narrative and standards differ radically for both groups.
In fact, studies have shown that this ideological drive that pushes "diversity over meritocracy" only antagonize racial relations between the groups that find themselves on both ends of "punching up".
Correct; “diversity” is shorthand for “racial Leninism”. It’s primarily about paying people off with status subsidies. Asians don’t need status subsidies so they don’t benefit from this system
I don't really see any political reason for this type of discrimination. It's just racism that nobody talks about because it's Asians who are seemingly well off economically when in reality the wealth disparity in this demographic is one of the widest.
People see fu er dai students driving Lamborghini and think thats how all Asians live when in fact Asia is not even a country.
For instance, its socially acceptable to make fun of Asian accents or other racially insensitive remarks but other minority groups are a no go.
I recall when Justin Kan moved into his new home he was welcomed with a vandalized garage door with racial slurs. This supposedly the "most socio progressive and liberal state".
It's the latter self titled label is an excuse to be even more blatantly racist while patting themselves on the back for having X number of friends from X ethnic group therefore I can't be a racist, not even realizing Asia isn't even a group of its own, its literally describing half of the lands on earth.
Again you are grossly generalizing. Wealth disparity gap is one of the widest compared to other demographics.
Basing your model on stereotypes and statistics is exactly why we have the issues I spoke about earlier.
> If you’re confused about any of this, your model is broken. All you need to know is that East Asians are high IQ (within 0.3stddev of anglo or Germanic whites). This predicts everything else, including economic outcomes.
wait wait wait. So you think IQ and race are correlated. So Africans are poor because they have low IQ is what you are saying.
> Slurs against Asians are less offensive because the connotation of being Asian is bad.
wow. I can't believe I just read this on HN. "Its okay to be a little racist to Asians because nobody thinks its offensive". Who are you?
Sounds like you have a really skewed view of Asians (who are we even talking about? East Asians? South Asians? South East Asians?
> Slurs like “kraut” or “nip” don’t really have any weight because they’re basically complements.
WTF??? Who are you to gatekeep what is offensive and what isnt'?
I just read you trying to justify racism against Asians. HN has truly fallen far from grace.
Of course - we have several decades of twin and sibling studies confirming this effect.
> I can't believe I just read this on HN
Sorry, I dropped a word from my comment - I meant "the connotation of being Asian is not bad". That is, no one really has a problem with Asians or thinks it's bad to have them around.
> Who are you to gatekeep what is offensive and what isnt
I'm making an observation, not "gatekeeping". There are definitely slurs that are more offensive than others.
People may have taken him more seriously if he didn't eat the crud off the bottom of his own bare foot and sexually harass female colleagues. Dude undermined his own message by being a complete creep.
>People may have taken him more seriously if he didn't eat the crud off the bottom of his own bare foot and sexually harass female colleagues. Dude undermined his own message by being a complete creep.
The fact that he remained in his position for so long and the degree to which people melted down and swore bloody vengeance against the "cancel culture mob" when he finally faced any consequences at all demonstrates how little his behavior actually mattered within the free software community.
If anything has undermined Stallman's message, it's been the failure of free software to adequately compete in terms of quality and UX to proprietary offerings in the marketplace. Their answer to Photoshop is Gimp, FFS.
I think you're right but I also think the recent Parler/Q stuff is relatively small fry. It was bad already, twitter finally getting the bottle to ban someone who'd been clearly violating their rules for half a decade is pretty minor.
I wish I could find it, but 10 years ago, probably longer now, there was a prescient video where there turned out to be only 4 tech companies left. Something like amazgooglesoft or something. The narrator had a deep voice and I think it was funded by a media company.
Edit: Found it through the keywords, "old prediction video where amazon microsoft google buy everything" lol
If you told Markus Wolf in 1989 that in 2021 most citizens in the world would write each other private and political communicatons via a tracking device that can’t be turned off, and that device has both microphones and cameras, he would raise and eyebrow and ask “How did we win the Cold War?”
The problem with "Stalin would've loved it" is that it's obviously an unsubstantive flamebait comment, and so was correctly downvoted. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? We're trying for a specific kind of conversation here: thoughtful, curious, respectful. That requires avoiding flamebait.
Re HN: I think you might be falling prey to the notice-dislike bias, which is a variation of sample bias where the comments we dislike or cause us pain start to feel like they're dominating the whole site. They don't dominate the site—HN is divided much as society (all over the world) is divided. But it feels like they do, because painful data points land harder and make deeper impressions than the things one likes or agrees with. The people who have opposite views to yours see HN as dominated by their opposite side (which is to say, your side), because of exactly the same mechanism.
If anyone predicted Trump becoming president 10 years ago, they would've been labelled a lunatic.
Reality is stranger than the fiction we all live within, because fiction has the constraints of being something we can comprehend and live with. It has to be redeeming and hopeful, reality doesn't.
Well, Reagan became president back in 1981, which wasn't much different. If anything he was just an actor (before getting into politics, which is even less qualification that a salesman/real estate guy.
And, aside from spending on BS like "Star Wars" and escalating things with USSR, Reagan also established the neoliberal greedy nightmare we live in since.
He had a longer political career (and one more directly relevant to being the chief executive of a government) than Obama before each became president.
Kind of like right now, how Simpsons predicted a global recession after President Trump's term is being jokingly brushed off even as it seems like we are in a bubble.
What reversal? If you're referring to a different scenario, then you should explain why they are comparable, instead of sarcastically declaring that they are.
I meant the general tone of this forum in regards to private companies doing what they want. Last week it was parler being deplatformed and most here were happy with that as the free market was doing what it wants. Now the free market is doing the same and people are pissed.
Unless you think that what robinhood did violated their contract, but I doubt the court will see it that way.
Few more cases of this, and finally people will understand that this argument is bullshit for platforms this size. Quantity has its own quality, as the saying goes.
It's possible to have one opinion on one case and a different opinion on a different case without any contradiction. Implying that that is untrue is unrealistic.
HN has lost its mind. Everything is suddenly a conspiracy against the noble individual investor. Story after story voted up to the front page with minimal relevance.
I mean, just think: were there really 100k legitimate Robinhood accounts that were blocked from an HME buy to justify a bad review? No. This is spam. It's just spam. People are angry, and this is a tool. And it's treated by Google exactly the way any other review spam would be. There's no conspiracy here.
> were there really 100k legitimate Robinhood accounts that were blocked from an HME buy to justify a bad review?
According to Motherboard, the majority of RH accounts hold GME.
There's also over 5 million subscribers to /r/wallstreetbets as we speak (most of them from this week). What percentage of those do you think would be "eligible" (according to your own criteria) to leave a legitimate review?
> According to Motherboard, the majority of RH accounts hold GME.
They retracted that later.
"Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that 56 percent of Robinhood users hold GME stock. This is incorrect, based on a misreading of a statistic on Robinhood. Motherboard regrets the error."
>I mean, just think: were there really 100k legitimate Robinhood accounts that were blocked from an HME buy to justify a bad review?
With out a doubt. Robinhood has 13 million users according to their own filing with the SEC. WallStreetBets has 5 million subscribers. An overlap of 100k between those two groups sure seems likely to me.
If 100,000 people are each leaving one review about their experience, presumably related to Robinhood's change earlier today to limit certain actions, how does that qualify as spam? Is it because it happened within a short timeframe? I'm sincerely interested in what qualifies as spam in this case given that these are organic, possibly non-automated reviews that map 1-to-1 to a specific user who has installed (and presumably used) the app.
I recall not too long ago people were balking at the idea.
HN isn't immune either. Try posting any criticism of Github's half assed apology to the Jewish engineer who simply said "watch out for Nazis" on Capitol Hill.
Try bringing up the anti-semitic memes being posted inside Github's work environment allegedly.
I guarantee you will be downvoted and flagged. Not only that but all of your other comments in your history will be downvoted.
Go ahead, try it. I've repeatedly experienced this and I don't care if I get banned now because it would confirm our greatest fears that not too long ago were brushed off as "partisan conspiracy theory".
The silver lining is that Fediverse is gaining more and more support until one day it becomes a serious contender.
Something similar happened after Four Seasons Total Landscaping hosted an impromptu Trump press conference. Within hours there were thousands of 1-star reviews on their Google business page, and then a day or so later all of the recent reviews were gone and they were back to a few dozen old ones.
This case is different since Robinhood did something that materially affects its users. And I guess a lot of these reviews must be legitimate? But I wonder if there's some switch that flips if a huge influx of reviews starts pouring in.
Just a reminder to de-Google your life too. There are some decent alternatives out there, for example Nextcloud for storage and open-source Linux phones like the PinePhone and Librem 5. As for video platforms, Library is looking promising, as well as other peer networks like PeerTube and BitChute. Alternatives are out there!
Bare in mind, Google have pulled these kinds of stunts before. Just recently they removed a bunch of negative comments and dislikes from Biden's presidential speech - whatever your political position, I think nobody should be above criticism.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to HN. We want thoughtful, information-rich, curious conversation here. This is obviously not that.
Maybe you don't owe big money which runs everything any better, but you definitely owe this community better if you're posting to it.
Can't repeat this enough. "Its a big club and you ain't in it" - George Carlin.
A lot of people are waking up to the coordination between the Oligarchs. Its hardly a surprise. The politicians, their government lackeys and media are in bed with them nice and comfy only feigning outrage when the system appears threatened.
The interesting thing about this quote is that there's a decent chance it's wrong. Is there a reason to believe that half the people are below the average? (As opposed to the median.)
Carlin is exposing his own ignorance of statistics with this quote. It's akin to when people criticize the grammar of others whilst making a grammatical mistake.
I don't know all the particulars of IQ distribution but I do know that it's controversial to say that it accurately measures intelligence. Carlin was talking in vernacular and so I think it's safe to assume he was not necessarily talking about IQ tests.
Even though IQ is designed to be normally distributed do you really think it actually is a normal distribution? It's a lofty goal and I'm sure it gets as close as one can but does this perfectly match up with reality? I have my doubts, hence my claim that there's a decent chance Carlin's comment is wrong.
Yes, median and mode are averages but few people mean those when they say "average". I doubt Carlin was statistically sophisticated enough to use average instead of median. Had he meant the median I think it reasonable to assume he would have said median. Do you commonly say "average" when talking about the mode or median? I doubt it.
Maybe don't be so quick to criticize next time.
Perhaps we could both benefit from this sage advice.
He's making a joke, not supporting his dissertation. He's allowed to be fast and loose with ideas for a laugh, as a professional comedian.
Do you think when he says things like "Takes the cake. Ya know, say 'Boy he really takes the cake'...Where? Where do ya take a cake? to the movies?" That he's exposing his own ignorance of idioms?
Yes, he's making a joke. It's funny and a pithy remark. The point is made. I find it an interesting point because when mocking other peoples' intelligence one ought to make certain they are correct. Sort of how when one criticizes another person's grammar they should make sure they didn't make a grammar mistake too.
Have you ever used "average" when you meant median? Carlin is speaking in the vernacular. I've never heard anyone use "average" when they meant median.
I have. When I talk about "the average person," I usually mean median or mode. Otherwise, you end up with hilarious statements like "the average family has 1.88 cars" which does not make logical sense.
I made that point on reddit a month ago, and some wag pointed out that since I evidently didn't know IQ scores were a bell curve, it appeared I was in the lower half.
This is funny because a bell curve is a continuous function and the set of people is discrete. The bell curve is a model of the population at large but I have my doubts that it's a perfect model and that it perfectly matches up with reality. I think the commenter may be the lower half!
Do you believe intelligence is truly a normal distribution? It's commonly modeled as such but is it actually truly a normal distribution? A normal distribution is a continuous function and the set of people is discrete. It's a great model but...is actually correct?
This is why I hate Carlin's stuff, it's so fitting for the internet tech sites because the main point of it is jeering and sneering at people who aren't you, who aren't woke. George Carlin was a Hollywood film star with a net worth in the millions if not tens of millions. He's on stage, not working a 9-5, getting you to laugh with him at all the "idiots".
I e pathize with the sentiment but theres a categorical difference between comparisons. A first world technical professional compared to a third world subsistence farmer is perhaps similar in wealth disparity. I do not agree the difference in influence in similar.
When he died his net worth was estimated to be around 10 million, but that came pretty late in life. For a lot of his life he was probably comfortable but far from wealthy.
We’re better off not living in world where no one can have an opinion unless it’s on a direct, currently lived experience. That’s some identity politics nonsense.
You can have any opinion you like, but if your opinion consists of passing around second hand sneers, it's a crappy low-value opinion. "It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." - "haw haw look at all the dumb sleeping people being this new". That's not an opinion, not a valuable commentary, it's just sneering.
Carlin, obviously. You’re attacking him rather than his commentary.
If you think his commentary isn’t useful, insightful, whatever, that’s fine. But basing your critique on his social/financial position is not good form.
I wasn't comparing Carlin to an Oligarch, I was complaining about the culture of quoting Carlin. If you posted "everyone except me is dumb" you'd get downvoted. If you post Carlin saying "everyone except us is dumb" you get upvoted.
Thats a fair point. I’m mostly just pushing back on the idea that Carlin is a member of the club merely because he was famous and had a few tens of millions.
It sounds conspiratorial to the average person, who isn't all that politicized or interested -- until it gets 'em. When it comes for you, it gets ya (via deplatforming or stock shennanigans or mortgage crisis bailouts or big wars and lies or whatever), and the online mainstream media Zeitgeist seems to support it, you join in on the understanding that big money corrupts and populism is worth a thought or two.
There are a few -- Glassdoor, and Google reviews let you post bad reviews of businesses even if they have tons of money. That's not to say I disagree that big money runs things, just that it's not 100%.
Glassdoor is gamed. I've spoken to some multiple HR people who make fake reviews for their employer to counteract some bad reviews. I wouldn't trust it for smaller companies.
I've been asked by a shitty (billion $ plus) company to write one of these type of unjustified positive reviews, directly after the rest of my devops team had quit and only days before I handed in my own notice. Needless to say I declined.
There were stories here on HN (might dig them up) about how Glassdoor blackmails companies with "it would be a shame if your good reputation was ruined by some random bad reviews, eh?" and removes bad reviews for companies that hand over the dough :)
I've worked at lots of employers who ask current employees for positive Glassdoor reviews shortly after a disgruntled former employee writes a bad review.
I wouldn't trust anything on that site. The positive reviews are written under duress and the negative reviews have an axe to grind.
the tone on glassdoor has shifted a lot since they discovered HR departments and recruiters as their main (only?) client base.
> ... It's also free to claim your employer account. After that, Glassdoor costs $249 to $600 per month depending on how many jobs you want to post and what specific features you want to add (again, the premium service costs more). -- (probably better sources this is just the top google result) https://fitsmallbusiness.com/glassdoor-vs-indeed/
Money they also run media, and when things settle down people read NYTimes, listen to NPR, and it slowly eats away at what they've learned until they're right back where they started.
"Well things aren't perfect but they could be far worse, and I'm so happy we have Bill Gates to fighting polio and malaria."
I think it's because reddit is in a panic. Gamestop is probably trying to make it more representative of the whole rather than pay attention to anything from the past week or so. Those are not from average reviewers. They're from emotional redditors caught up in the moment probably.
> Robinhood banned the purchase of $GME shares, while selling was still allowed
They had no choice. They had run out of capital to execute the orders they were getting.
They allowed people to unwind their existing positions, but not to create new ones. Considering trading was still going on elsewhere, not locking people into their current positions would have been worse.
It's more complicated than that. Jeff Bezos has a lot of money and relatively little political power. You can't just be rich; you also have to be in the right social groups.
If money truly equaled political power, we'd look more like Hong Kong pre-1997 (and arguably pre-2020).
He also had cities across the country doing cartwheels to get HQ2. He got an entire neighborhood in Arlington VA renamed, got a heliport approved, and other perks.
We’ve got billions of people who need to feel sufficient confidence in the media and authorities to take vaccines nobody has used before at a time when every media outlet has some agenda to monkey around with what we know to be true. Not cool.
People have taken them before. There were tests. A relative of mine was in one. Furthermore, the media doesn't certify which vaccines are safe. There are various governmental agencies in different countries for that.
Edmund Hoyle wrote a set of rules for the card game whist. His name was used in subsequent collections of rules for all sort of games. "According to Hoyle" has become idiomatic for "according to the rules."
Thank you. I've managed to go forty years without hearing that one. Now that I know the next level meaning, I'm still confused about what is being referenced.
At this point I'm almost convinced that CIA (or perhaps one of its rivals) is running some psy-op on the citizenry. It's as if they'll get a bonus as soon as a million Americans die of covid. (hmmm... maybe we should watch for big spenders later this year...) Everything that comes out of CNN, the social media firms, etc. seems calculated to make most Americans less likely to submit to vaccination.
I say this while wearing masks in public religiously, having already received the second dose of Pfizer. Covid really is killing people, and will continue to kill more and more as time goes on. We won't see "herd immunity" for years if ever.
While I agree in some ways... let me ask you, how do you know you are on the “right” side of any mask or Covid or vax debate? You get your news from the same places “the people who are wrong” do.
First of all, I don't get my news from those places. It has taken over a decade, but after flipping the bozo bit on dozens of news media firms, I feel I am a bit closer to having some idea of what's going on. If all you have is e.g. NBC News, then assuming that all the "wishful thinking" (which at times is over half of the content: "this time we've found a war we can win!") is exactly wrong will get you pretty close.
Second, you don't have to read the news to know that people are dying. In vulnerable populations, the increase is impossible to hide, especially since no one has gotten the flu this year. Old physicians and researchers who aren't trying to build their personal brands all agree (and have agreed since February last year) that masks and isolation are the ways to cope with respiratory pandemics. I'm hopeful for the vaccines, but I fear they won't deal well with the mutations that have never been conclusively ruled out. At the very least, vaccines are unlikely to harm people who don't have some sort of weird precondition. Besides which, unlike 99% of USA healthcare, they're free.
The system is rigged. Next we will find out Google Ventures invested in RobinHood. 100k bad reviews is a lot in recent days perhaps many were bots? I dunno
Stop the conspiracy theories. It's not Parlor here. Google don't give a fuck about RH. But they need to protect businesses and cannot be the judge. Think about someone influential who wants to ruin a restaurant and organize something similar to that. A low rating these days kills a business. Not allowing organized activities like this is a good thing.
Large threads are paginated. If you want to see all the comments you'll need to click through the More links at the bottom, or like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25951390&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25951390&p=3
(and so on)