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...