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.
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.