The ongoing conflict between the Stock Market and the Wallstreetbets subreddit continues to ignite as stock traders attempt to fire back at the popular trading app Robinhood. This recent attack on the app is in response to Robinhood halting stock trading for GameStop, the gaming retailer that set off this whole situation due to the way a number of hedge funds had been manipulating the market.
However, as the Redditors and other onlookers retaliated against Robinhood by review bombing the app on the Google Play Store, Google rushed in to halt the quick ratings decline. The tech conglomerate used a tactic that many critic aggregating websites have used before to keep knee-jerk reactions from affecting the state of a product before, effectively saving Robinhood from consequences of the GameStop trading freeze.
This exact tactic used simply required Google to find a number of new ratings that marked Robinhood at 1-star, the lowest available on the Play Store, and remove them. It's a strategy that websites like Metacritic have used before in order to keep the effects of online outrage organized by players who may have never played a game from affecting a review score without having actually been able to form a real opinion of their own. In the case of the recent review bombing of Robinhood, the situation is a little more complicated, on one part because Google had to remove almost 100,000 negative reviews in order to salvage the app's rating from a 1-star to a 4-star.
The following image courtesy of 9to5Google shows what the app's rating was before the purge:
The next image is of the app's score after the review purge at the time of this writing:
Viewers will notice that the total number of reviews has jumped down from over 274,000 to just over 178,000, leaving the majority of remaining reviews at 5-star ratings. While this is a common response when trying to give an accurate rating of any product, removing almost 100,000 user ratings is an extreme that most companies in this position haven't been forced to resort to. So, this does go to show that Robinhood's delisting of GameStop and AMC may have repercussions going into the future, even if Google was able to hold back the initial review bombing.
The situation with the entire GameStop stock situation and the resulting actions of Robinhood, as well as the review bombing that followed, is a complex inflection point on economic standards. It's likely that this won't begin and end with GameStop, or Robinhood, or Melvin and the other hedge funds that were responsible for these massive fluctuations throughout the Stock Market. However, it is clear that there are a number of people that are against Robinhood's actions, especially with Google having to go to such extremes in order to keep the app's status intact.
Source: 9to5Google