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Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours

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Re: Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours

#281

Post by IMTDb »

simias wrote: post #129
mulmen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may think reviews are calculated as: SELECT app, AVG(stars) AS display_stars FROM customer_reviews GROUP BY app; It’s actually an ML algorithm that optimizes for revenue.

Being condescending is not constructive. Can you substantiate your claim? I'm sure that there are many tweaks to the way apps are ranked, but I would expect that the rating itself would, indeed, mostly be a star average.

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;

Re: Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours

#282

Post by elihu »

simias wrote: post #115
partiallypro wrote: post #8

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.

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…

In this case you have a lot of people burned at the same time from the app failing to do the one thing they expected it to.

https://xkcd.com/937/

Re: Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours

#283

Post by SulfurHexaFluri »

utkugenc wrote: post #196
animal_spirits wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours

#284

Post by syops »

tclancy wrote: post #266
louwrentius wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this quote from Carlin: It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

"Think of how dumb the average American is. And then realize half of them are dumber than that ."

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.

Re: Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours

#285

Post by chordalkeyboard »

jodrellblank wrote: post #272
louwrentius wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this quote from Carlin: It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

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". It's a big club and he was in it.

I disagree, having a net worth of tens of millions doesn’t make you comparable to an oligarch.

Depending on where you live, if you don’t have 30-70 million in liquid assets, you are middle class (or below).

Re: Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours

#286

Post by ncallaway »

SllX wrote: post #221
zouhair wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We need to start by making it illegal to be a billionaire. I’m listening. What does this law look like?

2% annual wealth tax on wealth over 200M.

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.

Re: Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours

#287

Post by yters »

jodrellblank wrote: post #272
louwrentius wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this quote from Carlin: It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

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". It's a big club and he was in it.

Haha! Great point! Although, posting on this website odds are you are in the club compared to most of the world :)

Re: Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours

#288

Post by thereisnospork »

animal_spirits wrote: post #246
utkugenc wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

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?

Re: Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours

#289

Post by sangnoir »

happytoexplain wrote: post #89
optimalsolver wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours

#290

Post by utkugenc »

animal_spirits wrote: post #246
utkugenc wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

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?
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