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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

#51

Post by sidlls »

justinzollars wrote: post #26
empressplay wrote: post #12

I think it's becoming crystal clear Americans live in an oligarchy, not a democracy.

or Mussolini style Italian Fascism. Corporatist economics and authoritarianism

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.

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

#52

Post by optimalsolver »

cmdli wrote: post #16

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?

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

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

#53

Post by glenvdb »

cmdli wrote: post #16

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.

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

#54

Post by fastball »

cmdli wrote: post #16

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?

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?

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

#55

Post by dragosmocrii »

mulmen wrote: post #36
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.

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.

That's an excellent point

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

#56

Post by harikb »

alexanderh wrote: post #25
cmdli wrote: post #16

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?

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

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

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

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

#57

Post by fbelzile »

Jan 28 2020 (14:05): 196,808 reviews (2.x star rating) https://web.archive.org/web/20210128140536/https://play.goog...

Now: 180,500 reviews (4 star rating) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.robinhood....

It seems like they just deleted all of today's ratings.

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

#58

Post by bigtones »

fxtentacle wrote: post #21

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...

Especially Google Play ratings - they're not at all meaningful.

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

#60

Post by repsilat »

cmdli wrote: post #16

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?

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.

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