If I think an app deserves three stars, then I should give it a three star review, even if it currently has four stars.
If I say "well, this deserves three stars, so I'll give it a one-star review so as to pull the average closer to three" then I'm aiming to manipulate its rating, rather than rating it.
Note: I'm only guessing at Google's thought process here at the distinction between reviews and manipulation, and guessing at their detection algorithm; I'm not myself suggesting or implying that one-star reviewers are always engaging in manipulation. Of course you could honestly think an app deserves one star. The difference is unknowable to an outside observer. Only you can really know whether you're being honest, but that won't stop Google from assuming the worst.
True, but it seems that most of the current reviewers think that it should have 1 star, so giving 1 star reviews isn't an example of this kind of manipulation.
I agree that that's what happened here, but maybe Google didn't think so, or automatically assumes that the above is typically the scenario where one-star reviews are given.
Such reviews will naturally be at one end of the spectrum or the other - either one star or five stars, so as to maximize your voting power. So they might detect it in the case of reviews being bimodally distributed. I'd expect that two star reviews should always be treated as honest, so I'd recommend that as a review floor to prevent getting accused of manipulation and deleted.
I think reviews are naturally bimodally distributed because people are most likely to take the time to review a business when it is either amazing or horrible.
I would speculate that this is the reason that Yelp created its Elite program — to incentivize people to write tons of reviews, including for places that were neither amazing nor horrible. This gives Yelp the crucial middle ground reviews that as you say are more likely to be accurate than just the highs and lows.
This is why NetFlix switched to thumbs up/down, and the reviews are just as useless as before but more explicit in their useless-ness.
Funny that Steam does this too, but I find their reviews quite useful and accurate. Maybe because you rationalize your review and then give it an overall UP/DOWN, vs all these other approaches that ONLY give you the GO/NO-GO signaling...
Yes, I agree. They are naturally bimodally distributed, but I'd expect Google is arrogant enough to think that they can tell the difference between an honest and manipulative review using such statistics anyway.
They obviously can't, and that's why people are outraged.
I'm not Google, and I agree that obviously they made the wrong call here. I'm just showing that there is a distinction between a review and an attempt at manipluating the score, even if proving it requires insight into the heart of the reviewer. Google doesn't have that insight, but they are pretending they can guess.
As I suggested in a sibling post, a two-star review should be immune to this accusation, so if I were you I'd use a strategy of "two stars is the new one star".
It's not like people actually take the time to determine exactly how many stars is considered fair. I believe that if this rating system were replaced with a binary vote, like thumbs up/thumbs down, Google would've still removed the thousands of votes.
I understand the argument for removal, since Robinhood likely had no choice but to stop the trading. Ratings are meant to inform consumer choice, so a brigade of downvotes due to some recent controversy/memery is more likely to hurt consumer choice since it reduces the amount of information available. It means that one detail is drowning out all of the others, and regardless of whether a new customer would care about that detail, the fact is that it's the only one they'll be able to base their decision on while those votes stay up.
But on the other hand, app ratings are one of the very few powers consumers have to affect change in companies they do business with. Brigading the rating system (which has the effect of turning away new customers) is no different than bad word-of-mouth, where angry customers go out of their way to prevent others from doing business with the company that screwed them over. Even if a disgruntled customer goes a bit too far with hyperbole, that's their right. And it's a good thing that those things are possible, because it forces companies to always stay on their toes and think twice before doing something to hurt consumers.
It's the question of whether a consumer should have to "suck it up" when a company screws them over, or whether a company, whose full-time job it is to provide a particular service, should be held to a higher standard and be hurt when they provide bad service.
IMO, Google really should have not gotten involved here. This is an issue between Robinhood and its customers, whether or not you think what Robinhood did was fair. Google, a company being investigated for anti-competitive practices, just took another anti-consumer action.
Well, no. Maybe we're splitting hairs but when I rate something its to describe my experience, not to affect its overall rating. At no point do I think my one rating would have a meaningful impact on its overall score unless it has very few ratings to begin with.
I think it depends on whether your experience was positive or negative. If positive, I think your description applies. If negative, I think people really do want to impact the rating negatively.
So if you were to leave a 1 star review on the facebook app on the google play store, you actually think you're impacting their overall score in a meaningful way?
How is your question different from asking "when you vote for a particular candidate, you actually think you're impacting the overall vote in a particular direction?"
Validated app purchase, app-store rating is a democracy.
What is voting then? Nobody's vote matters? Is democracy a sham to you?
The math is simple though. Your vote is 1 added to a total. So is everyone's. The totals don't go above 0 tied with 0 based on your description. But clearly our votes don't all end in a 0-0 tie.
I can guarantee you that my vote in the 2020 presidential election had absolutely zero impact on who my state electors voted for, let alone impacting the race at a national level.
I would have to be a complete moron to think my vote had any impact on choosing the winner.
most people rating apps aren't expecting to be joined by a billion other people. So there MUST be another reason why people are leaving ratings. AKA the complete opposite of what the original commenter is claiming.
When I find a good product and review it, it's because I want to benefit the developer and help other people find it. I am trying to affect the overall rating.
A year ago I left a negative review for a dentist on Google Maps, then they contacted Google, said that such reviews are illegal in Germany (because a negative review can negatively impact their visitor numbers) and Google just removed my review... So Google reviews are absolutely useless.
This is not new in Germany/DACH area due to super weird and archaic privacy, anti-hate and anti-libel laws that could be interpreted in ways which open them to abuse and turned into censorship by malicious actors with enough resources/connections.
Basically in Germany/DACH free speech is heavily policed (ironically to stop NeoNazis voicing themselves) as to ensure it doesn't offend anyone so you end up with everyone only allowed to say either good or meh things in public/online.
Best example is the Austrian politician who had forced Facebook through a court order to have posts on her wall where people called her a corrupt traitor, deleted worldwide, under the argument that unless you can show proof of corruption, you calling them corrupt is libel according to the Austrian law, lol.
Even on platforms like Kununu (basically the Glasdoor of DACH) where employees can review their employers, if companies don't like the negative review employees leave, they can ask to have them removed citing similar laws, which makes the platform pretty much useless in the end as all reviews are either good or meh.
Honestly, Americans don't know how good they have it in the free speech category. Imagine not being able to call Trump corrupt on Twitter or say that Swaggy Bro Tech is an abusive sweatshop on Glassdoor/Google.
I heard a joke somewhere that the internet is just people libeling each other all day.
I personally think that we should be intolerant of intolerance, until of course that message is co-opted by "elites" (billionaires, politicians or whoever you believe is the group(s) pulling the strings) to suppress any criticism of their power.
I know it's more-or-less your point, but I am absolutely tickled by the idea of 'free speech' being 'heavily policed.' There's some doublethink if there ever was some! (Am I allowed to say that?)
When you're a political leader and you're paid by taxpayers to manage their livelihoods and decide their future you should put up with harsh criticism as part of your job be it proven or not, within reason.
But as it currently stands, the 1% use the anti-libel laws in their favor to censor anything that undermines their power/credibility.
For example, if you're a senator and while I don't have proof that you are corrupt, you can't possible tell me with a straight face that you awarding a lucrative public contract to the company where your daughter is on the board of directors, is a pure coincidence or a meritocracy, even if the paper trail says it's all squeaky clean.
> said that such reviews are illegal in Germany (because a negative review can negatively impact their visitor numbers) and Google just removed my review
This seems weird. Are they actually illegal? If yes, then shouldn't reviews be disabled in Germany.
They are only legal if the reviewer attaches proof of all claims made in the review and the interest of the reviewer of publishing the negative review outweighs the interest of the reviewee of not having it published.
Which is the courts way of saying "it is illegal when we see it, we just leave some nominal loophole noone can fulfil so we don't go against the letter of the law". All of this is just a lot of court cases influenced by some elaborate schemes to pick the right court (LG Hamburg preferably). But unfortunately those stand as long there isn't an explicit law changing the situation. Which won't happen, because the exact same laws and especially judgements defend corrupt politicians against journalists.
Also, any kind of free-speech movement is a no-go in Germany because "buhuh, but then the NeoNazis can say what they like!".
Motivation determines if it's illegal. There's plenty of legal precedent for brokers setting assets to liquidation-only when they might not meet their margin requirements.
If you believe this narrative I have a bridge for sale. Here's an obvious litmus test: did they re-open buying for GME after they raised an additional billion[0] which easily covers them in this position?
Can you please elaborate on why DTCC collateral calls or other things should prevent buying GME stock on non-margin accounts, like many brokers did? If you trade more, it actually brings more money to brokers.
I'm not talking about options or margin here, that's a different story and broker's risk management is involved.
This is not stuff most people worry about most of the time. Generally if you buy a stock on Monday you still want it on Wednesday; even if you don’t, we live in a society, and you’ll probably cough up the money anyway because that’s what you’re supposed to do. But at some level of volatility things break down. If a stock is really worth $400 on Monday and $20 on Wednesday, there is a risk that a lot of the people who bought it on Monday won’t show up with cash on Wednesday. Something very bad happened to them between Monday and Wednesday; some of them might not have made it. You need to make sure the collateral is sufficient to cover that risk. The more likely it is that a stock will go from $400 to $20, or $20 to $400 for that matter, 6 the more collateral you need.
But I suggest you read the entire thing - it does an excellent job discussing what's going on and showing why the current GME narrative makes no sense.
Honestly I'm not getting it. I understand the case when someone initiated the cash deposit and money are not settled yet, and there is a risk for broker that they will never settle on broker's bank account. But if we are talking about buying GME stock in non-margin account with settled money, what's the risk there?
If people bought stock on 400$ with settled cash, this cash is already on broker's account, so if it worth 20$ on Wednesday and poeple won't show up, what's the problem here?
Brokers even blocked buying GME stock on non margin accounts with settled cash.
edit: typos
You should read the notes, they help answer your questions.
Anyway, 2 points:
1. This is not about margin accounts. When trading on margin, it's RH that's financing you and taking on the risk. That's separate from what the clearing house does. Incidentally, RH did increase margin requirements due to the higher volatility.
2. The problem is RH offers instant settlement. That is, you can use your proceeds from a trade immediately in the apo, before even the trade is settled. That exposes RH, and the clearing house to settlement failures, and that's true regardless if the trade was done on a margin account or not. And that's the risk that clearing houses try to mitigate via asking for collateral.
How about Interactive Brokers case then, or AFAIK TD Ameritrade. They don't offer instant settlement (or may be they do, but the same was applied to settled money). They blocked buying GME stock on nonmargin accounts with settled money. What's the risk for them?
I don't know if the same was applied to RH (blocking GME stock on non margin account with settled money) but what I read is RH even removed GME ticker from the search, so you can't buy it.
edit: from the Bloomberg article you posted: "The trouble on Thursday began around 10 a.m., when after days of turbulence, the DTCC demanded significantly more collateral from member brokers, according to two people familiar with the matter.".
So I have my money settled in my broker's account for months, I'm buying without lending any additional money, why can't my broker show that I have all the collateral needed or even transfer my money?
Am I missing something here? Does it work per broker and not per broker's account maybe? So people with settled cash are affected becasuse of other people doesn't have enough collateral? Or may be because showing/transferring collateral to DTCC is not instantenius?
I was curious about its ratings in the App Store, so I took a look.
There are 2.4M ratings total, I don’t know how many there were prior to today or yesterday, but right now there are 2.4M.
If you sort by most recent, there are loads of 1 star written reviews.
You don’t need to write a review to leave a rating, you just need to “own” the app, meaning you have to hit Get on the free app. This acts like a $0 purchase. I stopped the download immediately after.
Now here is where my commentary becomes useless. I tried leaving a 1 star just to see if anything would happen. Nothing, so I start looking around for a way to undo because I don’t actually use Robinhood. Couldn’t find one before I made my way back to the page just to see the star rating I gave was removed.
Now one of two things could have happened, and the first is fairly likely.
1. By taking the actions I took in the sequence and time that I took them, Apple could have registered my rating as an attempt to bomb the score. That’s fine, I wasn’t intending to leave it.
2. Apple could also be monitoring scores and reviews.
Actually there’s a third possibility:
3. There could be a delay between when reviews are written and when they affect the score, so if a review was left yesterday, it might not act as a weight on the score until next Tuesday or whatever the delay is. I’m not familiar enough with the App Store to say.
It does look like there were a lot more reviews in the App Store than the Google Play Store to begin with, so it would take more negative reviews to significantly affect it.
Mostly I’m just curious why we’re seeing this in the Google Play Store but are not hearing anything about what is going on in the Google Play Store. Perhaps someone else with a history with the App could follow up on this that has actually used the App or is motivated to re-rate it to see if their rating goes through.
It's systematic and coordinated at this point: they will do whatever it takes to protect themselves, and their lords, against the little guy trying to make some money without them taking the lion's share.
Who's "they" is an interesting and debatable question, big tech, the finance sector, the gov, whoever else, but one thing for sure, we're the peasants in that story.
We're all in the Cuckoo's Nest. If those reviews weren't legitimate (i.e bots) then fine. But if legitimate users want to express their reviews they should - even when they are misinformed. Google should at most put an asterisk letting people know of possible misinformation before submitting their review.
They’re an angry redditor who downloaded their app to trade and then was locked out of buying GME or AMC. If that’s why they downloaded the app it’s no different than downloading Uber to get home, Uber experiencing an outage, and then leaving a 1 star review because the app did not work as promised and you are still stuck without a ride.
Wallstreetbets has over 963,000 people online right now and just gained over 4 million followers since monday, over a million a day. Cable news is talking about GME and the White House press secretary was asked about it. I think you grossly underestimate how mainstream Robinhood and GME have gotten just this week. 100k people in a day leaving a review because they found out about the app and GME at the same time and tried to strike it rich but were blocked seems like an under-estimate to me.
100,000 reviews is 33% of all the reviews RH has ever gotten. In a single day. Coincidentally, the same day that the sub-reddit decided to make a false accusation that RH was preventing the trading of GME as a favour to Citadel.
Past reviews might explain why it triggered some review or spam detection, but the circumstances around this point to a real shift in the perception of app quality to me. The sheer amount of interest in new retail investors (who robinhood specifically targets as their demographic) wanting to buy GME and then not being able to is a real use-case the app was broken for. If Uber suddenly surged in user growth 2x and started crashing / rides failed for users, would you remove their 1 star reviews? I would argue you should not, because the experience they delivered some user was broken. The technical reason is immaterial.
Robinhood had 13 million users as of 2020, and Motherboard was reporting that more than half of all robinhood users held GME this week. 100k reviews in a day seems quite likely if the real values are even half these numbers.
https://mobile.twitter.com/motherboard/status/13547982444553...
For all those thinking that this is some type of large-scale conspiracy by different entities, consider the following:
- Google automates everything and adds its 'AI' to it
- Even 10K reviews in such a short space of time will trigger the AI and then it will probably flag or even remove those reviews by itself (the AI is probably trained to see this as fraudulent)
- The whole app review thing is probably gamed already and the actual fraudulent reviews are never picked up because fraudsters are (sometimes) good at being fraudulent
I have no vested interest in Google and actually think people should de-Google as much as possible, but this is the same company that gets featured on HN frequently for its non-existent support.
For the sake of discussion: What if it were an app allowing the purchase of meme stocks that was review bombed by hedge fund managers? Should those reviews be removed?
Probably. Because hedge fund managers would not be trading on robinhood in the first place and are only reviewing it in the hopes of tanking the app's usage.
Whereas the users prevented from buying meme stocks are actually using the app and unhappy that they can no longer trade meme stocks.
The app literally took actions to the detriment of their users, to benefit of big, connected insiders, going against something as fundamental as the name of the company itself.
Why all the obfuscation and thought experiments around such a simple and blatant reality?
