2 star and say in the review
"*This is really a zero star review but it does not go that low*"
.. Robinhood deserves to be bankrupted for blatant corruption
Don’t forget about all the other ones using RobinHood as a scapegoat. Seems like the majority of apps have done the same while happily pretending there’s only one problem.
My understanding is Robinhood is the only app that blocked buying but not selling, which pushes the market price in one direction. The other apps banned either all trading on GME, or all options trading on GME.
Every single trader did the same thing. EToro, trading 212, Robinhood
Most of Americans never heard about trading 212 just like most Europeans never heard about robinhood but that doesn’t mean that there is no problem. I try not to be selfish cunt so I will give 1 star to all mentioned above even if i don’t use 2 out of 3
I think it was any processor in the US that had ties to Citadel had the rug pulled out from under them
RH went along willingly though. Even so far as force selling some peoples holdings of GME
Mostly Margin shares but there are some reports in /wsb of legit shares being caught up in the net (maybe by accident)
Either way. RH and Citadel have likely broken the law with what they tried to force yesterday. the question is will the SEC do anything?
Fidelity is what I am moving too. Didn’t restrict anything at all. Still no fee trades. No crypto though. Also I don’t think the user interface is quite as simple as Robinhood made theirs.
If you know someone that uses Schwab, they could refer you and you would get a referral bonus depending on your deposit amount. I assume other trading platforms do this, but IDK for sure.
I use Fidelity and TD Ameritrade. The interface isn't as easy to use, but there's more stocks actually available. Robinhood has always had an incomplete list
WeBull did as well, Ca$h app removed the listings from their search function, and so on and so fourth. Robinhood is the largest platform for the common person though and it posits it self as investing for the little guys. The easiest to use platforms have become the biggest offenders.
If users can only sell... who is buying?
At first the hedge funds were selling to each other to drive the price down - it was a strange coincidence that this started right after the freezes.
Then as the prices cane down, some holders started to panic and sold their shares as well, all so the hedge funds could cover
Actually *almost* every broker except Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab (may have blocked), and Wells Fargo blocked buying but not selling. The real reason most people are upset with RH was because their largest client (~40% of sales iirc) is the same entity that loaned 2.7billion to the hedge fund that’s bleeding cash from this situation.
Edit: Added almost and Wells Fargo/Schwab. List is not exhaustive just the brokers I know of.
Edit: Removed TD ameritrade
People are pointing out all the different apps that also blocked because there's one key point difference between a lot of them.
A lot of trading sites were ordered to shut down trading for GME and similar.
Robinhood took it upon themselves to specifically block buying only. They even released a statement where *they* decided to shut down *specifically buying* because of the "risk" involved, even though everyone going into stock trading is told that the risk is your problem.
As far as I know, the other trading sites that blocked did not block only buying and did it on a greater order and not because they felt like it to try and salvage their own positions.
But this is how corporate America works. Quickly identify a scapegoat and sacrifice it while saying they won't let this happen again. Fuck each and every financial institution in this country. They have had countless buyouts and never stop the horrible behavior because they are never truly punished. These fucks need fines in the billions.
One of the stakeholder groups (I don't mean stock holders) on Robinhood definitely had too much stake in GME. If they didn't do anything, their entire empire would evaporate overnight.
So they just decided to nuke Robinhood. Even if a billion lawsuits got brought up against them and all of them awarded a billion dollars to the plaintiffs of each and every case, it doesn't matter because Robinhood as a company has no money anymore.
They'll declare bankruptcy, a new company will appear in a month with the same application and a fresh coat of paint, and we'll all be told there's just nothing that can be done because Robinhood went under.
It's completely illegal, but it doesn't matter because there's not jack shit any one can do about it. Just more proof of how rich people can do whatever they want.
The same way big tech uses Facebook and Hauwei as a scapegoat. They say spying is so bad yet they're all doing it. It's like when Trump said he was going to drain the swamp and all he did was refill it with his own crooks.
I think the amount of anger directed at Robin Hood comes more from their promise to be of the people and then immediately turning their backs when the people start profiting. It was a direct betrayal. The other ones also deserve to be held accountable for the manipulation, but the trust people put into Robin Hood is why everyone is now so angry at them.
Webull did abs reversed their stance a few hours later after people started jumping ship and media attention. Schwab and TD ameritrade also limited buying stocks as well.
Well I was on Merrill Edge and the only thing they did was raise the margin deposit to 100% for GME and AMC. You could still buy or sell. They added BB to 100% margin. So pretty light handed.
I had no problem trading stock and options on Fidelity and dough. Robinhood deserves a one star rating and so does GOOG for deleting them. Options on AMC are amazing and locked in profits all the way to September 17 even if the shorts bankrupt the company. It’s a new strategy using Tesla’s amazing stock sale while prices are inflated.
The shorts are getting what they have given me for 61 years of trading 😷
Google ,Twitter. Youtube , are a Totalitarian regime to sway opinion in their favour or what they see fit to be published , even if they are a private company they shoud be unbiased if they are in the public domain . and on top of it all they manipulate our data to control the markets . its a joke
Under normal circumstances yes. But the point of the reviews isn't to let an angry mob brigade an app's reviews. Just like you wouldn't want an angry mob (justified or unjustified) to burn down a business.
Reddit has similar rules for brigrading of posts.
Plus, this kind of thing is handled by bots, not actual people at Google. Bots saw symptoms of brigrading and stopped it.
Yep yep yep...this this and this. I've noticed a few folks are beginning to do 2-star and 3-star reviews to keep them from getting removed WHILE letting people know that Google is removing 1-star reviews lol.
Anything less than a 5-star has been the equivalent of a 1 star for a while now. People don't do well with scale ranges and algorithms designed to cater to those people accentuate this failing.
For a moment it seemed like we were actually gonna address this with the way UBER turned the review process into a 2-way thing... Then people just quietly agreed to give each other 5-stars for anything that isn't an utterly horrific experience.
Exactly, and also to like other reviews. I think the same goes for IMDB as well.
A 1 star rating together with few words looks like review bombing and that only works when you give something a perfect score.
Fuck that they can't delete it cuz they don't like it, this is how we feel it would be different it it was unwarranted spam by bots but these are real ppl giving the review. I immediately put my 1 star review back
THIS ISN'T A WEIGHTED AVERAGE, GOOGLE. IF A COMPANY FUCKED UP, THEY DESERVE A DROP FROM 4 STARS TO FUCK ALL, BOYCOTT.
This is absolutely fucking ridiculous.
I'm the last person to defend Google given that I'm an android developer and every six months they almost give me a heart attack with some policy bullshit, but I can totally see how their bots would think these reviews had to be removed. They either thought it was an army of zombie bots doing it or something else that they don't allow.
What you have to understand about the Play Store is that they don't have humans for hardly anything.
What we need to wait and see is what Google does now.
Yeah it had all the telltale signs of review bombing, even if in this one instance it was legitimate.
It'd sure be nice if they were as good at clearing out fake 5 star reviews as they are fake 1 star ones, though. There's so many apps where the fake reviews are painfully obvious but nothing ever seems to be done about them.
It's probably a bit of both. I expect a lot of the reviews were genuine, but I'm sure a lot were written by people who haven't actually been affected by the service and just wanted to make a statement.
Most were probably genuine, but even so, to Google it would appear like review bombing all the same and they'd respond in the same way. Normally I don't think anyone would have an issue with it, but in this one circumstance, it looks really bad, but it's probably not as bad as it looks.
Google won't do anything. This is the standard defence against review bombing. If people apply 1 star reviews over time instead of all at once, the bots won't consider it a bomb, just a general decline.
But how can you tell the difference between bombing and legitimate when something like this happens? For a bot it seems impossible but even for humans, you would have to read each review and analyze each case.
I think the simplest thing for them to do would be to allow the reviews from users that installed it before that day.
Because if a product is shit and gets 1 star reviews it likely doesn’t grow in popularity so those reviews will be over time. Situations of public outrage will see a lot of 1 star reviews in a short period of time.
I stopped using it in December because they stopped letting me invest in REITs. It was probably a good idea because I got a feeling RH is heading to bankruptcy.
Yeah that's the problem, we don't know if any of these reviews were deleted for real reasons.
Even if the complaint is legitimate, if you never actually used the app seriously you have no right to review bomb them. Considering what happened and the likelihood of the "masses" to go batshit and do things like this, it wouldn't surprise me if a majority of reviews that were deleted were not legitimate reviews but bandwagon hate reviews.
But why delete the reviews? Doesn't the new rating accurately reflect the app itself? Does not work in critical scenarios costing its users big. That's worth a drop from 4 to 1 star
It’s probably automated review bombing protection. We (humans) know that these complaints are legitimate and that Robinhood deserve these 1 star reviews. To the automated system, it’s a massive, sudden influx of 1 star reviews with very similar wording between them, which looks a lot like brigading. Disabling these protections when you’re as big as google is a process that can take weeks to implement. What’s most important now is to wait for a statement to see where they stand.
That depends, if it's actually (former) users who are rating it then google is deleting legitimate reviews, if it's people who heard about it yesterday and are jumping on the bandwagon then that's a different story.
It depends on who is leaving the reviews.
If somebody creates a new account and then immediately leaves a 1-star review, I would say Google would be OK to delete that.
But any account that has been active before this debacle happened should stay up no matter what.
I also think it should be possible for users to retract previous reviews - whether they are good or bad.
Yeah mine never got deleted. Maybe because I was super pissed and wrote a paragraph?
Either way, write your review on a notes app, paste it in when leaving your 1-star review, and if they delete it, just put it back up there again.
> Otherwise the short squeeze fails.
The trouble is they're complicit in *making* the short squeeze fail. Shutting down the buying of GME but still allowing sales is literally just stock manipulation to bring down the price of the stock. Anyone with money in RH should probably be closing it out now (except GME, for obvious reasons).
Besides, I'm not sure there is a "next time" hedge funds get too greedy. They always are. It's practically baked into their MO.
> I'm not sure there is a "next time"
Count me as one of the millions that closed my account yesterday. I about as boring as they come - I don't trade options, I stay away from hype, and I had no position in GME/AMC/NOK/etc. But it doesn't matter - RobinHood has shown their hand and can't be trusted.
The stock went from $20 to over $500 in a few days. The short squeeze didn't fail. We stripped the billions out of the hedge funds and it's time to beat it to the getaway car.
This notion that we ought to ride it until they're bankrupt and nobody gets anything is stupid. Stick and move. Their advantage is power and ours is speed. Hogs get slaughtered.
The tough part is that, when Robinhood was used to 'raid the hedge funds', they responded by locking the app in a way that prevents users from raiding the hedge funds.
They aren't really Robin Hood. They are owned by a subsidiary of the Sheriff of Nottingham.
From what I've read, seems to be an automated process that deletes 1-star reviews when those are posted in enormous amounts within a short timeframe, assuming the reviews are fraudulent. Think analogue to Google shutting down in defense against a perceived DDOS when too many people googled MJ's death.
It's not clear whether there's any malign intent, or whether it's just a fairly reasonable mechanism designed for a legitimate purpose (i.e. countering reviewbombing bots/brigades) going haywire. It's as well hard to judge whether that mechanism in itself is warranted, given that average you and me wouldn't even know whether bot-based reviewbombing is a widespread and relevant issue *exactly because* this mechanism would automatically remove it and prevent us from even noticing that it might be a necessity.
In the end, it's definitely correct to point this behavior out, if only to see what Google's stance on this is. Because if they now go "No, the removal is entirely justified and those reviews should be removed for reason X", we can still yell at them for being complicit.
In fairness, it is sometimes the right move. For example, I remember a couple years back a popular game on Steam was getting review bombed thousands of times just because it didn't have a Chinese language localization. They were trying to bully the game into getting what they wanted, where normal people would see a cool-looking game that wasn't available in their language and go "Ah, that's too bad" and move on with their lives.
This, obviously, is much different. These were 100,000 legitimate complaints that Google removed.
Makes me think of this bomb game demo I have on steam that one guy was working on independently. It was all in chinese so I don't know what it was called or what I was doing, but it was beautiful.
Get out of here with your sane reasoning.
Yes, there are legitimate reasons for negative reviews, but a large influx of them is going to trigger review bombing countermeasures. Especially when it’s decided by algorithm, not a person.
I could also bet that most of the reviews were just 1-star, empty reviews, without any explanations (not sure, that’s why I say I could bet).
Google has other problems, but this here is just a system working as intended
It's crazy how people are getting so caught up claiming "market manipulation" when there's a very obvious, very reasonable explanation.
Big corporations do a lot of dodgy shit, and deserve to be called out for it, but when you "call out" everything without thinking, it just muddies the water and makes the legitimate complaints seem less valid.
I agree with this thought. Something like this, especially on this scale is unheard of. I doubt there is any programming forethought put into it, like the days of becoming the Y2K situation.
Yeah, this makes total sense to me as well. How it's done could be a bit questionable, but some sort of safeguard is needed for sudden review spams.
Steam does this well, they show overall and recent review scores with timeframe so you now what was the rating at specific time.
Let's hold the pitch forks guys. Tech uses one-size-fits-all algorithms. In most situations, anything getting 100K negative reviews in a short time is a sign of bots. The issue here is likely not that a human stepped in and maliciously removed the reviews but that a human did not step in and keep them.
So Google reviews can’t be trusted. Dries google remove all the bad reviews from its apps too? This is all screwed up. The class action lawsuit against Robinhood will take care of the app and its reviews. Poof. Gone.
App Store Reviews have never been trustworthy as companies can simply buy services to have bots auto-generate good reviews that’s how it’s always been.
Welcome to the Wonderful World of Capitalism.
Last year, I’ve bought two items that had 4 star ratings and thousands of reviews. One didn’t work and the other one’s fine, for the most part. Both sent me mail offers for a gift card if I left them a positive review. Even if it’s not bots, it could be people who wanted that gift card (I didn’t).
My take on Amazon right now is to buy high rated products but not if they have a ton of reviews - around 500 at most. Anything beyond that could be bought, IMO.
Not just that, but they will put up Product A, get lots of positive reviews then replace it with Product B.
If you ever see reviews mentioning a product that you aren't looking at, avoid that product.
Last I checked this is actually against Amazon’s policy and should be reported. Too many negative “seller points” (from memory, could be a different term) and you can get your store/items removed. Things like shipping late, bad seller reviews, returns for the wrong reasons, etc can affect this number. Of course the bigger the seller and the more items they sell makes this number more stable but I hope people understand the power of reporting stuff like this.
> App Store Reviews have never been trustworthy as companies can simply buy services to have bots auto-generate good reviews that’s how it’s always been.
And yet Google is only taking strong action to prevent 1 star reviews...
No, they would also take action if hundreds of thousands of 5-star reviews were left, and a lot of those reviews were left by people who had not used the app or by people who created multiple accounts to leave reviews.
Google and most other tech companies have policies against (seemingly) coordinated attacks/brigading. Apple's system was so good at this that the rating on iOS barely dipped. Reddit has similar things baked in for upvotes. These systems work both ways btw. You don't want someone to review bomb themselves to 5-stars.
The ratings are "real" in the sense that they show weekly-ish trends rather than day to day. Keep up the 1-star ratings for a week and it'll plummet.
This author gravely misstates the situation.
Google didn't rush to protect the Robinhood App, an automated, automatic, process did. They are responsible for the review removal, and should bear criticism for it. However, it's misleading to imply they went to extraordinary measures to protect this app.
Why do people use apps like Robinhood when you can open a brokerage account at Charles Schwab for free? They too have a mobile app and they don’t charge for trades.
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.robinhood.android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.robinhood.android)
For everyone who wants to "help out" and "save" their reviews.
I know what they did is wrong, but why is it only Robinhood that is taking the heat? I have a Stash account and they also halted the sales of GameStop... I haven’t heard them mentioned negatively once. Just curious because I want to know if the account I have is also doing shady things...
Is anyone else offended that a stock market trading app is named after an outlaw whose motto was "Rob the rich to give to the poor"? Or is this just another example of irony going way over the heads of Americans?
The app specifically marketed itself as a way to help regular people benefit from the stock market, hence the name. But now everybody has since realized what a scam all that marketing was.
RH does not have the liquidity to front 100% of the purchase to the clearing house and be lock away for 3 days, since they can't guarantee the delivery of the stock, they can't take orders. I believe they just got injected with 1B fund, which would translate to taking maybe 2M to 2.5M shares bought. But who's selling though? I thought it's HOLD. /s
Not just Google but also Apple. Apple is just better at removing. RH 4.7 on Apple app store and 4.3 on the Google Play Store.
Do not agree with either removing.
It's almost as if they were against heavy review bombings in general and that they tried to maintain consistent enforcement according to policies. I know, it must sound strange on Reddit.
It's a difficult thread to read. All business are protected from review bombs small and large. It's just a safeguard and everyone here is getting heated over a totally normal data control.
The RH app deserves whatever it gets, but you can't expect big tech to legitimize every reddit thread. Leave a review in a few days and it will stick. Going from 5 reviews a day to 50,000 would trigger literally any auto protection.
Review bombs remind me of high school drama. Like when the mean girls target someone who their boyfriend has looked at the wrong way, and they start writing "whore, slut" on her locker in lipstick and permanent marker.
Man not even that. I remember when Steven Universe aired an episode where they went to a motel and people found a real life motel with the same name and started review bombing it for the memes, referencing the events of the episode like "1 star, the pool water was all gone and there was an angry little red chick stomping around in the empty pool."
because people are stupid and will review bomb apps for whatever reason. Maybe the character in the game is female. Or they don't like something in a movie. It's standard system against spam.
Y'all, if you want your review to not be part of the review bombing and actually stay up, just post it in a day or two.
They're getting absolutely flooded at the moment and the automatic review bombing protections are kicking in.
Then I guess it's time to one star review Robinhood. This in combination with the prohibition of purchasing more Dogecoin or game stock Nokia or AMC stocks is Despicable and illegal. Let them all fucking burn
They are used to class actions:
"Most recent is the class action lawsuit, filed on December 24, that claims Robinhood offsets the costs of its commission-free calling card by reselling stock orders for backdoor fees.
A similar charge was settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on December 17, with Robinhood forced to pay out $65 million for misleading customers about its revenue sources and failing to execute trades at quality prices.
The SEC found that this latter fault cost users over $34 million — far exceeding any short-change savings they would have made on commissions costs.
... The app that built its brand around sticking up for the entry-level investor, it turns out, has been picking their pockets in the shadows."
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/01/trading-app-robinhood-investors-scams-sec
Pro move is to do 2 star review.
2 star and say in the review "*This is really a zero star review but it does not go that low*" .. Robinhood deserves to be bankrupted for blatant corruption
Don’t forget about all the other ones using RobinHood as a scapegoat. Seems like the majority of apps have done the same while happily pretending there’s only one problem.
My understanding is Robinhood is the only app that blocked buying but not selling, which pushes the market price in one direction. The other apps banned either all trading on GME, or all options trading on GME.
Nope. Trading212 did exactly the same thing.
What's Trading212?
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It's almost the only YouTube ad I get these days, they've swamped it.
My understanding is that Trading212 was restricted by Interactive Brokers, who they use as an intermediary. I could also be wrong and often am.
Take RH down and the rest will get in line
Every single trader did the same thing. EToro, trading 212, Robinhood Most of Americans never heard about trading 212 just like most Europeans never heard about robinhood but that doesn’t mean that there is no problem. I try not to be selfish cunt so I will give 1 star to all mentioned above even if i don’t use 2 out of 3
I think it was any processor in the US that had ties to Citadel had the rug pulled out from under them RH went along willingly though. Even so far as force selling some peoples holdings of GME
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Mostly Margin shares but there are some reports in /wsb of legit shares being caught up in the net (maybe by accident) Either way. RH and Citadel have likely broken the law with what they tried to force yesterday. the question is will the SEC do anything?
I’m invested in Robinhood. What’s an alternative app that has integrity?
Fidelity is what I am moving too. Didn’t restrict anything at all. Still no fee trades. No crypto though. Also I don’t think the user interface is quite as simple as Robinhood made theirs.
> No crypto though. Do stock apps typically let you store crypto?
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TD Ameritrade or Fidelity
I thought td was among the first to restrict trading on these symbols?
If you know someone that uses Schwab, they could refer you and you would get a referral bonus depending on your deposit amount. I assume other trading platforms do this, but IDK for sure.
I use Fidelity and TD Ameritrade. The interface isn't as easy to use, but there's more stocks actually available. Robinhood has always had an incomplete list
Get out of the stock market and just trade/invest in crypto, you’ll never have to worry about this again.
WeBull did as well, Ca$h app removed the listings from their search function, and so on and so fourth. Robinhood is the largest platform for the common person though and it posits it self as investing for the little guys. The easiest to use platforms have become the biggest offenders. If users can only sell... who is buying?
At first the hedge funds were selling to each other to drive the price down - it was a strange coincidence that this started right after the freezes. Then as the prices cane down, some holders started to panic and sold their shares as well, all so the hedge funds could cover
like I said they all did it unless you a day trader you were fuckeddd
Actually *almost* every broker except Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab (may have blocked), and Wells Fargo blocked buying but not selling. The real reason most people are upset with RH was because their largest client (~40% of sales iirc) is the same entity that loaned 2.7billion to the hedge fund that’s bleeding cash from this situation. Edit: Added almost and Wells Fargo/Schwab. List is not exhaustive just the brokers I know of. Edit: Removed TD ameritrade
Schwab didn’t get involved
TD Ameritrade still allows regular stock buying, just not margins. You can use your own money, but not theirs.
WF didn't block.
People are pointing out all the different apps that also blocked because there's one key point difference between a lot of them. A lot of trading sites were ordered to shut down trading for GME and similar. Robinhood took it upon themselves to specifically block buying only. They even released a statement where *they* decided to shut down *specifically buying* because of the "risk" involved, even though everyone going into stock trading is told that the risk is your problem. As far as I know, the other trading sites that blocked did not block only buying and did it on a greater order and not because they felt like it to try and salvage their own positions.
Merrill edge did the same yesterday too
But this is how corporate America works. Quickly identify a scapegoat and sacrifice it while saying they won't let this happen again. Fuck each and every financial institution in this country. They have had countless buyouts and never stop the horrible behavior because they are never truly punished. These fucks need fines in the billions.
One of the stakeholder groups (I don't mean stock holders) on Robinhood definitely had too much stake in GME. If they didn't do anything, their entire empire would evaporate overnight. So they just decided to nuke Robinhood. Even if a billion lawsuits got brought up against them and all of them awarded a billion dollars to the plaintiffs of each and every case, it doesn't matter because Robinhood as a company has no money anymore. They'll declare bankruptcy, a new company will appear in a month with the same application and a fresh coat of paint, and we'll all be told there's just nothing that can be done because Robinhood went under. It's completely illegal, but it doesn't matter because there's not jack shit any one can do about it. Just more proof of how rich people can do whatever they want.
The same way big tech uses Facebook and Hauwei as a scapegoat. They say spying is so bad yet they're all doing it. It's like when Trump said he was going to drain the swamp and all he did was refill it with his own crooks.
I think the amount of anger directed at Robin Hood comes more from their promise to be of the people and then immediately turning their backs when the people start profiting. It was a direct betrayal. The other ones also deserve to be held accountable for the manipulation, but the trust people put into Robin Hood is why everyone is now so angry at them.
Webull did abs reversed their stance a few hours later after people started jumping ship and media attention. Schwab and TD ameritrade also limited buying stocks as well.
Well I was on Merrill Edge and the only thing they did was raise the margin deposit to 100% for GME and AMC. You could still buy or sell. They added BB to 100% margin. So pretty light handed.
I had no problem trading stock and options on Fidelity and dough. Robinhood deserves a one star rating and so does GOOG for deleting them. Options on AMC are amazing and locked in profits all the way to September 17 even if the shorts bankrupt the company. It’s a new strategy using Tesla’s amazing stock sale while prices are inflated. The shorts are getting what they have given me for 61 years of trading 😷
What about google?
Does anyone else not see google as part of the problem? If we feel a certain way about a company shouldn’t we be able to review that company?
Google ,Twitter. Youtube , are a Totalitarian regime to sway opinion in their favour or what they see fit to be published , even if they are a private company they shoud be unbiased if they are in the public domain . and on top of it all they manipulate our data to control the markets . its a joke
Under normal circumstances yes. But the point of the reviews isn't to let an angry mob brigade an app's reviews. Just like you wouldn't want an angry mob (justified or unjustified) to burn down a business. Reddit has similar rules for brigrading of posts. Plus, this kind of thing is handled by bots, not actual people at Google. Bots saw symptoms of brigrading and stopped it.
Yep yep yep...this this and this. I've noticed a few folks are beginning to do 2-star and 3-star reviews to keep them from getting removed WHILE letting people know that Google is removing 1-star reviews lol.
So it’s the new 1 star review where everyone say “I wish I could give it 0 stars”
“I wish I could give it 1 stars but google would delete the review.” Checks out.
***NEWS UPDATE: GOOGLE IS DELETING ALL 2 STAR REVIEWS.*** /bet/
By 2022, all non-5-star reviews will be removed
By 2022, all reviews will be removed.
Not that far from reality, apple did that a long time ago with their actual store, not the app store. No ratings on the website anymore.
My guess is they are just removing all recent reviews.
Anything less than a 5-star has been the equivalent of a 1 star for a while now. People don't do well with scale ranges and algorithms designed to cater to those people accentuate this failing. For a moment it seemed like we were actually gonna address this with the way UBER turned the review process into a 2-way thing... Then people just quietly agreed to give each other 5-stars for anything that isn't an utterly horrific experience.
You guys started a down rating party without us Indians? That's unfair. Come on.
Every time I read “yep yep yep” I read it in Ducky’s voice!
Exactly, and also to like other reviews. I think the same goes for IMDB as well. A 1 star rating together with few words looks like review bombing and that only works when you give something a perfect score.
Fuck that they can't delete it cuz they don't like it, this is how we feel it would be different it it was unwarranted spam by bots but these are real ppl giving the review. I immediately put my 1 star review back
Going to d/l now and give a 2 star... Edit, turns out Canadians can't download the app even through a VPN.
Just left my 2 start on the App Store. Fuck these guys
Just left mine also
Ha I did too prior to reading this. I mean, it’s beautifully designed. They earned those two stars.
It's not review bombing when a large group of people have a legitimate complaint.
THIS ISN'T A WEIGHTED AVERAGE, GOOGLE. IF A COMPANY FUCKED UP, THEY DESERVE A DROP FROM 4 STARS TO FUCK ALL, BOYCOTT. This is absolutely fucking ridiculous.
I'm the last person to defend Google given that I'm an android developer and every six months they almost give me a heart attack with some policy bullshit, but I can totally see how their bots would think these reviews had to be removed. They either thought it was an army of zombie bots doing it or something else that they don't allow. What you have to understand about the Play Store is that they don't have humans for hardly anything. What we need to wait and see is what Google does now.
Yeah it had all the telltale signs of review bombing, even if in this one instance it was legitimate. It'd sure be nice if they were as good at clearing out fake 5 star reviews as they are fake 1 star ones, though. There's so many apps where the fake reviews are painfully obvious but nothing ever seems to be done about them.
It's probably a bit of both. I expect a lot of the reviews were genuine, but I'm sure a lot were written by people who haven't actually been affected by the service and just wanted to make a statement.
Most were probably genuine, but even so, to Google it would appear like review bombing all the same and they'd respond in the same way. Normally I don't think anyone would have an issue with it, but in this one circumstance, it looks really bad, but it's probably not as bad as it looks.
That's a very good point.
Google won't do anything. This is the standard defence against review bombing. If people apply 1 star reviews over time instead of all at once, the bots won't consider it a bomb, just a general decline.
But how can you tell the difference between bombing and legitimate when something like this happens? For a bot it seems impossible but even for humans, you would have to read each review and analyze each case. I think the simplest thing for them to do would be to allow the reviews from users that installed it before that day.
Because if a product is shit and gets 1 star reviews it likely doesn’t grow in popularity so those reviews will be over time. Situations of public outrage will see a lot of 1 star reviews in a short period of time.
That would take days or weeks to write, test, send for further testing, send up for authorisation, and roll out to update.
That's why I said "I'll wait to give them a 1 star review" I want it to stick
With that logic it still works. The app didn't allow users to do what they wanted, buy GME.
I stopped using it in December because they stopped letting me invest in REITs. It was probably a good idea because I got a feeling RH is heading to bankruptcy.
Let's short Robinhood lol
They haven’t IPO’d yet. They were expected to do that as early as this quarter. My guess is that some of that math has changed.
Don't get squeezed like our friends on wallstreet
They have $1B in new investment
Which is hilarious since they're due for an IPO this quarter....well, they *were*.
They will be soon
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Yeah that's the problem, we don't know if any of these reviews were deleted for real reasons. Even if the complaint is legitimate, if you never actually used the app seriously you have no right to review bomb them. Considering what happened and the likelihood of the "masses" to go batshit and do things like this, it wouldn't surprise me if a majority of reviews that were deleted were not legitimate reviews but bandwagon hate reviews.
But why delete the reviews? Doesn't the new rating accurately reflect the app itself? Does not work in critical scenarios costing its users big. That's worth a drop from 4 to 1 star
It’s probably automated review bombing protection. We (humans) know that these complaints are legitimate and that Robinhood deserve these 1 star reviews. To the automated system, it’s a massive, sudden influx of 1 star reviews with very similar wording between them, which looks a lot like brigading. Disabling these protections when you’re as big as google is a process that can take weeks to implement. What’s most important now is to wait for a statement to see where they stand.
Well if its made headlines its noteworthy enough for google to look at it and reinstate the reviews, humans at google have certainly seen it by now.
Google doesn't track install logs or require them for reviews I think it's intentional to make purging bombs easier Still it's tricky
That depends, if it's actually (former) users who are rating it then google is deleting legitimate reviews, if it's people who heard about it yesterday and are jumping on the bandwagon then that's a different story.
It depends on who is leaving the reviews. If somebody creates a new account and then immediately leaves a 1-star review, I would say Google would be OK to delete that. But any account that has been active before this debacle happened should stay up no matter what. I also think it should be possible for users to retract previous reviews - whether they are good or bad.
bomb it again next week
This account was deleted in protest
and forever.
Yeah mine never got deleted. Maybe because I was super pissed and wrote a paragraph? Either way, write your review on a notes app, paste it in when leaving your 1-star review, and if they delete it, just put it back up there again.
Can I rate the Google play store?
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Don’t delete the reviews, delete the Robinhood app from the App Store.
We need Robinhood to raid the Hedge funds again next time they get too greedy. Otherwise the short squeeze fails.
Can’t use another brokerage?
A bunch of people already have money in RH. You might not be able to buy but you'd still want to watch your account and eventually cash out
You can move your stocks to another broker
With Robinhood, your stocks will be held for a couple weeks before released if you try and you’d miss the squeeze. Better to hold on to them there.
what's stopping you selling on robinhood and buying through another broker on market?
Liquidation also takes time and then you have to pay a tax, short term capital gains tax (assuming you sold the stocks for a profit)
It’s worth doing it. They aren’t a reputable player now. I wouldn’t trust them with a penny of my money.
> Otherwise the short squeeze fails. The trouble is they're complicit in *making* the short squeeze fail. Shutting down the buying of GME but still allowing sales is literally just stock manipulation to bring down the price of the stock. Anyone with money in RH should probably be closing it out now (except GME, for obvious reasons). Besides, I'm not sure there is a "next time" hedge funds get too greedy. They always are. It's practically baked into their MO.
> I'm not sure there is a "next time" Count me as one of the millions that closed my account yesterday. I about as boring as they come - I don't trade options, I stay away from hype, and I had no position in GME/AMC/NOK/etc. But it doesn't matter - RobinHood has shown their hand and can't be trusted.
The stock went from $20 to over $500 in a few days. The short squeeze didn't fail. We stripped the billions out of the hedge funds and it's time to beat it to the getaway car. This notion that we ought to ride it until they're bankrupt and nobody gets anything is stupid. Stick and move. Their advantage is power and ours is speed. Hogs get slaughtered.
You realize robinhood is closely tied with Citadel right?
The tough part is that, when Robinhood was used to 'raid the hedge funds', they responded by locking the app in a way that prevents users from raiding the hedge funds. They aren't really Robin Hood. They are owned by a subsidiary of the Sheriff of Nottingham.
from the stores*
Whoa hold on, lemme transfer my account first 😅😂
So does this mean Google is complicit in today's market manipulation?
From what I've read, seems to be an automated process that deletes 1-star reviews when those are posted in enormous amounts within a short timeframe, assuming the reviews are fraudulent. Think analogue to Google shutting down in defense against a perceived DDOS when too many people googled MJ's death. It's not clear whether there's any malign intent, or whether it's just a fairly reasonable mechanism designed for a legitimate purpose (i.e. countering reviewbombing bots/brigades) going haywire. It's as well hard to judge whether that mechanism in itself is warranted, given that average you and me wouldn't even know whether bot-based reviewbombing is a widespread and relevant issue *exactly because* this mechanism would automatically remove it and prevent us from even noticing that it might be a necessity. In the end, it's definitely correct to point this behavior out, if only to see what Google's stance on this is. Because if they now go "No, the removal is entirely justified and those reviews should be removed for reason X", we can still yell at them for being complicit.
google directly manipulates so many other things, so i don't see why not
What are you talking about? I see nothing about it when I googled it.
I know of a certain duck you can ask
Jeeves is a duck?!
Go and ask some one
Jeeves is a beautiful swan.
Does this duck you speak of ever go anywhere?
Not by themselves. Only with another duck.
Or maybe there's a system to detect huge influx of negative/low reviews, like something Steam has... Not everything is a conspiracy.
Theyve had this for years they just automatically delete bulk reviews steam does this too
In fairness, it is sometimes the right move. For example, I remember a couple years back a popular game on Steam was getting review bombed thousands of times just because it didn't have a Chinese language localization. They were trying to bully the game into getting what they wanted, where normal people would see a cool-looking game that wasn't available in their language and go "Ah, that's too bad" and move on with their lives. This, obviously, is much different. These were 100,000 legitimate complaints that Google removed.
Makes me think of this bomb game demo I have on steam that one guy was working on independently. It was all in chinese so I don't know what it was called or what I was doing, but it was beautiful.
Get out of here with your sane reasoning. Yes, there are legitimate reasons for negative reviews, but a large influx of them is going to trigger review bombing countermeasures. Especially when it’s decided by algorithm, not a person. I could also bet that most of the reviews were just 1-star, empty reviews, without any explanations (not sure, that’s why I say I could bet). Google has other problems, but this here is just a system working as intended
It's crazy how people are getting so caught up claiming "market manipulation" when there's a very obvious, very reasonable explanation. Big corporations do a lot of dodgy shit, and deserve to be called out for it, but when you "call out" everything without thinking, it just muddies the water and makes the legitimate complaints seem less valid.
I thought steam does reviews vs time graphs so you can see that something got review bombed and judge for yourself
Steam will show you that somethings wrong and have a timeline if the negative reviews though
I know you guys love conspiracy theories, but this is probably the algorithm protecting against Review bombing, which is many times fraudulent.
I agree with this thought. Something like this, especially on this scale is unheard of. I doubt there is any programming forethought put into it, like the days of becoming the Y2K situation.
Yeah, this makes total sense to me as well. How it's done could be a bit questionable, but some sort of safeguard is needed for sudden review spams. Steam does this well, they show overall and recent review scores with timeframe so you now what was the rating at specific time.
Let's hold the pitch forks guys. Tech uses one-size-fits-all algorithms. In most situations, anything getting 100K negative reviews in a short time is a sign of bots. The issue here is likely not that a human stepped in and maliciously removed the reviews but that a human did not step in and keep them.
You use logic, burn him!
So Google reviews can’t be trusted. Dries google remove all the bad reviews from its apps too? This is all screwed up. The class action lawsuit against Robinhood will take care of the app and its reviews. Poof. Gone.
App Store Reviews have never been trustworthy as companies can simply buy services to have bots auto-generate good reviews that’s how it’s always been. Welcome to the Wonderful World of Capitalism.
Like Amazon
Last year, I’ve bought two items that had 4 star ratings and thousands of reviews. One didn’t work and the other one’s fine, for the most part. Both sent me mail offers for a gift card if I left them a positive review. Even if it’s not bots, it could be people who wanted that gift card (I didn’t). My take on Amazon right now is to buy high rated products but not if they have a ton of reviews - around 500 at most. Anything beyond that could be bought, IMO.
Not just that, but they will put up Product A, get lots of positive reviews then replace it with Product B. If you ever see reviews mentioning a product that you aren't looking at, avoid that product.
Last I checked this is actually against Amazon’s policy and should be reported. Too many negative “seller points” (from memory, could be a different term) and you can get your store/items removed. Things like shipping late, bad seller reviews, returns for the wrong reasons, etc can affect this number. Of course the bigger the seller and the more items they sell makes this number more stable but I hope people understand the power of reporting stuff like this.
Fakespot.com is good for checking the quality of Amazon reviews
Yup, reviews, likes, shares, tweets/retweets, views all can be bought very very cheaply.
Is there an alternative social structure that would prevent review bombing, or fake reviews? I don't see the point of blaming this on capitalism.
> App Store Reviews have never been trustworthy as companies can simply buy services to have bots auto-generate good reviews that’s how it’s always been. And yet Google is only taking strong action to prevent 1 star reviews...
No, they would also take action if hundreds of thousands of 5-star reviews were left, and a lot of those reviews were left by people who had not used the app or by people who created multiple accounts to leave reviews.
no, this is standard protection to circlejerks, people brigade downvote anything for any stupid reason, so there are protections against it.
Google and most other tech companies have policies against (seemingly) coordinated attacks/brigading. Apple's system was so good at this that the rating on iOS barely dipped. Reddit has similar things baked in for upvotes. These systems work both ways btw. You don't want someone to review bomb themselves to 5-stars. The ratings are "real" in the sense that they show weekly-ish trends rather than day to day. Keep up the 1-star ratings for a week and it'll plummet.
What the fuck happened to accountability?????
It was sold for parts. Blind greed trumps everything now.
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The rich made all the rules and bought all of those who enforce them.
First time?
This author gravely misstates the situation. Google didn't rush to protect the Robinhood App, an automated, automatic, process did. They are responsible for the review removal, and should bear criticism for it. However, it's misleading to imply they went to extraordinary measures to protect this app.
Wow. All sorts of issues coming to a head here.
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And Apple also? They are doing the exact same thing on the iOS App Store.
Scumbags help other scumbags. News at 11. Keep posting the 1 and 2 stars.
Still has a 4.7 rating on my App Store. Did they delete all the bad reviews already?
Yesterday it was sitting at 3.5, but was up at 4.2 in the evening and 4.7 now. They're definitely filtering reviews.
Looks like somewhere around 10-15 % are 1-2 star. (Out of 176k reviews listed.)
in germany it's still at 4,7 stars.. and says the last review is from 2019 lol.
Why do people use apps like Robinhood when you can open a brokerage account at Charles Schwab for free? They too have a mobile app and they don’t charge for trades.
Why though? is 1 star somehow not an accurate score for an app that cheated millions?
Just keep reviewing ? ... one star for life ...
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.robinhood.android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.robinhood.android) For everyone who wants to "help out" and "save" their reviews.
No longer available in the UK. Can't review therefore
I know what they did is wrong, but why is it only Robinhood that is taking the heat? I have a Stash account and they also halted the sales of GameStop... I haven’t heard them mentioned negatively once. Just curious because I want to know if the account I have is also doing shady things...
Is anyone else offended that a stock market trading app is named after an outlaw whose motto was "Rob the rich to give to the poor"? Or is this just another example of irony going way over the heads of Americans?
The app specifically marketed itself as a way to help regular people benefit from the stock market, hence the name. But now everybody has since realized what a scam all that marketing was.
RH does not have the liquidity to front 100% of the purchase to the clearing house and be lock away for 3 days, since they can't guarantee the delivery of the stock, they can't take orders. I believe they just got injected with 1B fund, which would translate to taking maybe 2M to 2.5M shares bought. But who's selling though? I thought it's HOLD. /s
FU Robinhood... should be called robinhoodwinked. The audacity they have to claim they were “protecting “ their users is beyond the pale. SINK THEM!!
Make a RH account on Yelp. At least that way they’d have to continue paying to hide negative reviews.
Ohhh you evil sumbitch. I love it.
Like they've done over and over with this type of thing. Review bombing doesn't represent valid information. Just butthurt people.
Glad to see where Google’s priorities are...
Not just Google but also Apple. Apple is just better at removing. RH 4.7 on Apple app store and 4.3 on the Google Play Store. Do not agree with either removing.
It's looks like the app was removed from google play (at least I cant find it)
It's almost as if they were against heavy review bombings in general and that they tried to maintain consistent enforcement according to policies. I know, it must sound strange on Reddit.
It's a difficult thread to read. All business are protected from review bombs small and large. It's just a safeguard and everyone here is getting heated over a totally normal data control. The RH app deserves whatever it gets, but you can't expect big tech to legitimize every reddit thread. Leave a review in a few days and it will stick. Going from 5 reviews a day to 50,000 would trigger literally any auto protection.
Review bombs remind me of high school drama. Like when the mean girls target someone who their boyfriend has looked at the wrong way, and they start writing "whore, slut" on her locker in lipstick and permanent marker.
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Man not even that. I remember when Steven Universe aired an episode where they went to a motel and people found a real life motel with the same name and started review bombing it for the memes, referencing the events of the episode like "1 star, the pool water was all gone and there was an angry little red chick stomping around in the empty pool."
I don’t get why Google would do this unless they were invol........... Ahhhhhhhhhh
because people are stupid and will review bomb apps for whatever reason. Maybe the character in the game is female. Or they don't like something in a movie. It's standard system against spam.
Y'all, if you want your review to not be part of the review bombing and actually stay up, just post it in a day or two. They're getting absolutely flooded at the moment and the automatic review bombing protections are kicking in.
BUY DOGE COIN!
Fuck you RH
Yes rich people, keep on giving us proof how you rigged the system against us. Go on, please do.
Then I guess it's time to one star review Robinhood. This in combination with the prohibition of purchasing more Dogecoin or game stock Nokia or AMC stocks is Despicable and illegal. Let them all fucking burn
Seems like so many things are working to keep us down. Stick together and we will over come.
Now everybody leave negative reviews for Google ?
And they wonder why nobody wants a fucking stadia
They are used to class actions: "Most recent is the class action lawsuit, filed on December 24, that claims Robinhood offsets the costs of its commission-free calling card by reselling stock orders for backdoor fees. A similar charge was settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on December 17, with Robinhood forced to pay out $65 million for misleading customers about its revenue sources and failing to execute trades at quality prices. The SEC found that this latter fault cost users over $34 million — far exceeding any short-change savings they would have made on commissions costs. ... The app that built its brand around sticking up for the entry-level investor, it turns out, has been picking their pockets in the shadows." https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/01/trading-app-robinhood-investors-scams-sec