I hate Google with passion, for the things they do, but this is what they did for every brigade-rating that I can remember. And it makes sense. It's not anyone reviewing the app, it's people mass 1-starring the app because they decided to do so as a hive-mind. It's essentially fake reviews and I wouldn't be surprised if it's automated.<p>Also, as far as I gather, people who wrote a human-like text review to go with their rating didn't get their review removed.
I'm not sure how I feel about this to be honest.<p>I appreciate they were following their guidelines and wouldn't like anyone to troll an app like this but I don't think google should have removed bad reviews. Unless court ordered maybe, based on FCC findings of market manipulation or something like that. Robinhood sells their client's data to financial institutions. These institutions then can use that to skim off Robinhood's clients. The GameStop fiasco puts all that at risk so they pull the plug. Like a casino kicking you out because you’re winning too much at poker and taking money from their high rollers, who pay a premium to peek at your cards.<p><a href="https://blockworks.co/robinhood-sells-your-data-but-does-that-matter/" rel="nofollow">https://blockworks.co/robinhood-sells-your-data-but-does-tha...</a>
This is bad.<p>I can absolutely understand it for a political pile-on, or an unrelated protest, but this is a fundamental complaint with the service not following operating procedure.<p>If I were king, the app would be pulled until financial amends were made.
There's more ditching to do. Avoid Play store and install adware-free FLOSS apps from F-Droid.<p><a href="https://f-droid.org" rel="nofollow">https://f-droid.org</a>
I highly recommend how to read Valve's blog posts about review bombing. It's insightful and well done.<p><a href="https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1448326897426987372" rel="nofollow">https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...</a><p><a href="https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1808664240333155775" rel="nofollow">https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...</a><p><a href="https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1621770561051427036" rel="nofollow">https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...</a>
It doesn't seem unlikely that they have som anti-brigading software that automatically or semi-automatically deletes certain reviews. Such as when huge amounts of people in a short time instalsl an app just to immediately leave a bad review, and then uninstall.
I do wonder if there's scope for a class action lawsuit against Google over it's review management on the Play Store. Not just for this, it's just so obviously broken to the point of being completely useless.
It is totally obvious that the Google Play Store has fake reviews on every single app. I am not talking about bots; I'm <i>pretty</i> sure Google does it themselves. I have found apps which do absolutely nothing correctly and there was <i>not a single</i> positive review in the comments. Still, the app had a 3.9 rating.