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Google removes over 5M reviews from Play Store to improve TikTok rating

294 points by sdan 6y ago

MintelIE 6y ago
Were they real reviews, or Indian review-bombs generated as part of a nationalistic campaign to get back at China? Review sections were weaponized long ago, first by companies, and now, increasingly, by nations.
- KukicAdnan 6y ago
  Indian review-bombs.
- katktv 6y ago
  Indian review-bombs, but for the other reasons entirely. The dumb ones as well.
- mikeywazowski 6y ago
  You can judge for yourself. Currently if you sort by 'Most relevant', it looks like about 90% of the reviews are 1 star, by Indian users.
Barrin92 6y ago
>"Another reason was the enraged fans of famous Indian YouTuber Carry Minati flooding PlayStore with 1-star reviews. Carry Minati had created a video titled YouTube Vs TikTok, part of an ongoing feud between YouTube and TikTok users. His video went viral and was taken down for violating YouTube’s terms of service. This happended because many TikTok users reported the video saying it was bullying in nature." Seems reasonable enough to remove those because this is just brigarding and has nothing to do with authentic users of the app.
- frequentnapper 6y ago
  I happened to watch the video, which was a response to a Tiktok user badmouthing Youtube creators. I didn't really see any bullying, just funny retorts. I guess when it comes to Youtube, they just censor anything as long as enough people complain.
  - Carpetsmoker 6y ago
    500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute; it's impossible to moderate all of that. "Lots of users reported it in a short timespan" is a reasonable heuristic to quickly remove ISIS beheading videos and whatnot. It's not perfect, but nothing YouTube does at this kind of scale will be.
    - frequentnapper 6y ago
      Right, but in addition, not providing any transparency to the content creator, or any ability to appeal the decision or re-instate the video in my opinion is unforgivable.
      - Carpetsmoker 6y ago
        Yeah, the entire process of dealing with exceptions (or indeed, anything that involves human judgement) is atrocious at YouTube, and has been for many years. jwz wrote about this years ago as well (and there are many more stories): https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/youtubes-joke-of-a-fair-use-appeal-process/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/youtubes-joke-of-a-fair-use... That being said, I feel too many people fail to appreciate the problems YouTube is facing and are too quick to simply shout "censorship!"
        thrwaway69 6y ago
        That link calls me a brogrammer man child... My ego is hurt.
    - stonogo 6y ago
      > 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute; it's impossible to moderate all of that. Ironically, I hear about this fact every time Youtube makes the news for ... you know ... moderating all of that.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  In principle I can see the argument that this is low quality content that doesn’t help YT at all, but more salient is how unbelievably easy YT’s moderation system is to abuse. For a company proud of their AI chops, their ability to detect astroturfing is pretty weak.
- tw1912112 6y ago
  I posted in other comment, if I tell you that X restaurant sucks because they have rats everywhere, and you go to that restaurant and actually see the rats and rate it as 1 star on Yelp, are those not authentic users? Who counts as authentic user on TikTok, do the people who have viewed videos created on TikTok but shared on Twitter?
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    > f I tell you that X restaurant sucks because they have rats everywhere, and you go to that restaurant and actually see the rats and rate it as 1 star on Yelp, are those not authentic users? Yes they are but that's not what's going on here. The barrage of downvotes in this case was the result of a platform feud between Youtube and TikTok content creators who told their userbases to go and vote the app down, and some sort of issue between India and China. These people likely have not used the app at all, aren't actually evaluating the app itself, and the grievances they have are likely irrelevant to the vast majority of users who look at the rating.
    - tw1912112 6y ago
      That's not true, there are plenty of disturbing videos of men promoting rapes and assaulting them using chemicals. If those videos were restricted to TikTok, that would have been a different case but TikTok actively promotes sharing these videos on other networks and the viewers have authentic concerns. I agree that PlayStore is doing it right by removing the reviews that are related to the service but not pertaining to the Android App itself, but then what counts as "using the app"? Seeing the videos created on TikTok counts as "using the app" or just the experience of the app itself? I would describe those reviews as "non-descriptive" than irrelevant, but yes they are very noisy. It's about the same as rating 4chan on trustpilot. Also, if any country that has banned TikTok, like UAE or Indonesia, because of a different jurisdiction, then it's a valid criticism? If I go to a restaurant, and they only accept Chinese currency, then I would rate it as 1-star since I have only USD and the restaurant is not my preference.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  I don't think it's even brigading -- that implies that it's at least humans. The app gained somewhere on the order of tens of millions of one-star reviews over a short period of time. To me, that sounds more like someone's generating the one-star reviews.
  - square_usual 6y ago
    CarryMinati has nearly 20 million subscribers[1], and he was just one of many... forces, behind the reviews storm. India has over a billion people with at least 500 million smartphone users[2], tens of millions isn't that out of the way. [1] https://socialblade.com/youtube/c/addicteda1 https://socialblade.com/youtube/c/addicteda1 [2] https://www.news18.com/news/tech/smartphone-users-in-india-crossed-500-million-in-2019-states-report-2479529.html https://www.news18.com/news/tech/smartphone-users-in-india-c...
    - duskwuff 6y ago
      > India has over a billion people with at least 500 million smartphone users, tens of millions isn't that out of the way. One out of every fifty or so people in a country the size of India getting involved enough in an Internet fight to download and rate an Android app is pretty hard to believe. 10M is a huge number, even for a big country like India.
      - square_usual 6y ago
        Indians sure as heck don't need motivation to download TikTok; it was downloaded 323 million times in India over last year. https://sensortower.com/blog/tiktok-revenue-downloads-2019 https://sensortower.com/blog/tiktok-revenue-downloads-2019
cscurmudgeon 6y ago
People are discussing this as a China vs India thing. It is not. People recently found that TikTok is extremely lax in dealing with content that promotes violence. https://www.newsweek.com/india-tik-tok-faizal-siddiqui-acid-attack-1505122 https://www.newsweek.com/india-tik-tok-faizal-siddiqui-acid-...
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  Or Youtube takes an extreme viewpoint banning anything remotely close to content with weapons.
  - cscurmudgeon 6y ago
    Tiktok too takes an extreme viewpoint banning anything remotely close to offending China.
    - partiallypro 6y ago
      Yeah, I remember a Tiktocker getting banned for pointing out that China has Muslims in concentration camps and it barely made the news cycle. Tiktok found something else she had also violated and used that as a banning offense...but we all know full well they would have never enforced that were it not for her CCP rant. Tiktok has a lot of creatives on it, but I worry that it's a bit of an infiltration.
- sneak 6y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-local-moderation-guidelines-ban-pro-lgbt-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-l...
- throwaway46543 6y ago
  The last time TikTok was proactive in removing violent content, it got blamed for censorship. There was a girl who posted a video that included pictures of Bin Laden, so TikTok removed it. She then created alt accounts and continued posting. When TikTok removed the video again, the news media said it was because she mentioned Uighurs, when in reality it was because of the Bin Laden pictures.
chipperyman573 6y ago
This really hits on a lot of nerves of the general HN crowd (especially when these things are combined): - Google - "Censorship" (loosely defined) - China (vs India vs a US company, which could really be its own point) But if you read the article it seems to be a logical decision. Google (likely) did something similar for zoom: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/03/24/zooms-android-app-rating-has-been-absolutely-destroyed-by-coronavirus/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/03/24/zooms-android-app-r... Assuming there's nothing left out by the author, I don't really think there's anything newsworthy here, just something that google did that aligns with its past actions (not to say it doesn't belong on HN)
- plerpin 6y ago
  I swear you could generate a 100% realistic comment thread from a Markov chain of those broad topics.
  - Freeboots 6y ago
    https://hncynic.leod.org/ https://hncynic.leod.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694578
    - blauditore 6y ago
      Wow, excerpt of my first attempt with this: > I'm sure Google is planning to release a time machine which can manage the tracking of tasks that I just worked on last year. > I can't tell if it's a "Google Timemachine" or a "Google Tracking App". If they release a "Time TimeMachine", this is a killer feature that will have a huge impact on how people interact with their time. I would be interested to know if this also means that you can just add a "Time TimeMachine" that will do some tracking on the number of meetings you have, or if I want to track your "time."
    - thepete2 6y ago
      that is surprisingly good. I tried "world is ending in the next 2 weeks" and I'm not sure I would recognise them as fake.
mrtweetyhack 6y ago
So Americans need to go give TikTok a - rating, got it.
DigitallyFidget 6y ago
It has only a 1.4 star rating as of right now. It clearly didn't do anything to help the rating of the app.
- nsoonhui 6y ago
  It could have been far worse had the negative reviews were not removed
  - mikeywazowski 6y ago
    The lowest rating is 1 star. 1.4 is almost as bad as you can get.
- dzhiurgis 6y ago
  Oh wow. Why such difference with iOS store where it’s over 4? Edit: it’s all clearly spam on Google Store
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    It's even more obvious on the "lite" version of their app. Within the last month (probably even more recently), the total number of installs nearly doubled, and the rating dropped from a reasonably stable 4.0 to 1.1. https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok_lite/com.zhiliaoapp.musically.go https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok_lite/com.zhil... (Amusingly, the ratings of the other TikTok app, which looks like it might not be available in India, are unaffected: https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok/com.ss.android.ugc.trill https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok/com.ss.androi...) I have a very hard time believing that this represents organic user behavior. It seems far more likely that someone's scripted the process of installing and rating the apps.
  - quantummkv 6y ago
    The population segment involved in this whole tiktok vs youtube drama mostly uses Android. iOS is not as popular in India as Android mostly due to higher prices.
golemiprague 6y ago
The more interesting question is how to make reviews valid again. There was some liberterianish hope that reviews and ratings could replace regulations and it does work to some extent but not as good as people hoped.
tehlike 6y ago
Google did this as part of review integrity. Doesn't have anything to do with censorship, as far as i can tell. disclaimer: ex-google employee, who did not work in play.
- halfjew22 6y ago
  Work in play, heh... Silly puns aside though, I definitely agree with your viewpoint.
sloshnmosh 6y ago
The Google Play Store reviews are pretty much worthless and corrupted by ratings farms and app developers that steal the users google credentials to post fake 5 star reviews from within the app itself. There was a time where you didn’t have the option to only view negative reviews. At least that has improved to where users have options in a drop-down menu.
Thorrez 6y ago
>to improve TikTok rating The article gives no evidence of this. Sure the rating improved from 1.2/5 to 1.5/5, but that doesn't mean it's the purpose of the removal.
tiktokVsYoutube 6y ago
Posting from a throwaway account - This article barely scratches the surface. This was a very entertaining story that I followed to the minute and here’s some context: Tiktok content, specifically in India, from the very start has been very[1] very[2] _cringy_ (weird hairstyles, weird things being said, weird ways of expressing friendship, love, etc). I don’t mean the cringe that you associate with western Tiktok content but for some reason majority of what the Indian kids were producing stood out as being beyond cringe to existing internet users (mainly Youtube / Instagram userbase). I suspect this has to do with the millions of first-time internet / smartphone users on Tiktok + the heavy influence of exaggerated emotional Bollywood drama now being done in 15 seconds on a smartphone. Youtube on the other hand obviously had an existing audience that was used to consuming content of a certain level of quality / production. Apart from just pure cringe content, Tiktok obviously did not bother with copyright infringements much and in fact promoted the concept of people plagiarizing each other’s work. So the Youtube / IG communities started making memes and calling out the cringe and bad content of Tiktok. At some point one of the big influencers on Tiktok (Amir Siddiqui referred to in this article) provoked one of the biggest Indian Youtuber, Carryminati who is known for roasting people. Amir made a video saying Tiktok videos require talent, hard work, and a lot more dedication than Youtube videos and basically asked Carry to roast him. Carry then took on the challenge and released an 8-minute roast video that beautifully called out all the cringe that tiktok users make, things that Amir had done in the past, etc. That Youtube roast video set several records within hours. The roast was actually so effective, it was hilarious to browse through Tiktok for the next few days as the entire Tiktok community sort of agreed and started making fun of each other and that single video actually shook the entire Tiktok community. About 5-6 days later, Youtube took down the video (which was now the highest liked video of India by far) without explanation probably after receiving thousands of flags from tiktok users. It’s worth mentioning that the roast included comparisons of Amir to being a eunuch multiple times among other questionable insults because of his past tiktok videos. In my opinion, the video was definitely not trying to be Politically Correct but it wasn’t bad enough to be taken down. Once the video was taken down, the Youtube and Instagram(meme pages) community started a campaign to leave a 1-star rating for Tiktok on the playstore and basically destroyed their rating which was about 4.5 when this started. In case you’re wondering, I am an avid HN reader, an accomplished software engineer but I do spend about 5% of my free time enjoying Indian cringe. In fact I curate a big list of my favorites and share with my friends but very few people actually enjoy the cringe. Was it worth explaining all of this to one of the most intellectually stimulating forums on the internet? Probably not. But I had to admit to myself that I know a lot more about this story than I’m proud to admit and that it would make me happy that it gets saved in the HN archive. A copy of the original video that was taken down by Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZ241zUgbA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZ241zUgbA [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciYohWR2Pio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciYohWR2Pio [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg9gjmcHgE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg9gjmcHgE8
nwienert 6y ago
I just stumbled on a site that heavily leans on the “tech is censoring Trump” angle, namely this article about Google taking down a study on Hydroxycholoquine. I thought of posting it to front page, but instead I can just attach to this other timely thread of Google being evil/censors. Genuinely curious about info people have around this, if it is legit or not. It seems like something you’d have expected to see here front page, but then again this site leans left. https://defyccc.com/google-deleted-covid19-cure-paper/ https://defyccc.com/google-deleted-covid19-cure-paper/
- kragen 6y ago
  It looks fake. Would a real medical researcher refer to SARS-CoV-2 as "coronavirus" in the title, as if they didn't know there were other common human coronaviruses? Why are they publishing on Google Drive instead of MedrXiv? Why is the last author a lawyer? Why does it say "Stanford PhD" in the byline? Dr. Broker (the first author) does seem to have been doing biomedical research at UAB last year (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336977942_Targeting_DNA_Damage_Response_as_a_Strategy_to_Treat_HPV_Infections/download https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336977942_Targeting... is a legitimate virology research paper he worked on, which doesn't make obvious errors like the above), but https://web.archive.org/web/20200403213718/https://www.uab.edu/medicine/biochem/56-tom-broker-phd https://web.archive.org/web/20200403213718/https://www.uab.e... suggests he was gone by April 3. https://www.peakprosperity.com/forum-topic/chloroquine-hoax/ https://www.peakprosperity.com/forum-topic/chloroquine-hoax/ says he was born in 1944, so he'd be 76? Hmm, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8143845/Malaria-cure-coronavirus-promoter-cryptocurrency-hustler-fake-Stanford-University-claim.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8143845/Malaria-cur... says, "Professor Thomas Broker, who was named in the 'white paper' before it was removed from Google, asked for his name to be disassociated with it, while the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he works, said a claim that Nobel Prize winner Dr. Louise Chow's laboratory was involved was also false." "…the university's public relations manager Bob Shepard added that Dr. Chow, a Nobel-prize winner mentioned in the acknowledgments, was no part of the study. "'No one at UAB has any connection to this paper,' Shepard said. "Shepard said that Broker 'had previously done research into chloroquine as a possible therapy for human papillomavirus' which is more commonly known as HPV. "Shepard said: 'He had some contact with one of the authors of that paper at that time. He had no involvement with the work on coronavirus and is not affiliated with that research in any way.'" Now, I don't want to depend on the Daily Mail, but it seems like they may happen to have been correct in this case.
kumarvvr 6y ago
I understand the need to remove "review bombs", but aren't review bombs reviews too? Say a company that develops a product says or does something insensitive, in the earlier days, people would publicly boycott that product, related products or what have you. The company would either stand down and apologize, or put it's foot down and say it's right. Now picture the same thing with Tik-Tok. There are innumerable instances where Tik-tok has been shown to be biased, censors specific content, etc etc. Review bombing is as good as boycotting a company. Causing a company real consequences in response to their actions. It's a form of rightful protest. I am not using the product. I am expressing my views about the product in a review system that is public and open. As long as there are no bots involves, Google is morally wrong, in my view.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  The point of a reviews from an app store's perspective is to help users decide whether they would benefit from an app. That some subreddit or Twitter or whatever decides to brigade a particular app does not necessarily provide much signal about whether a generic user will want an app. An app marketplace is not generally going to be interested in facilitating boycotts on apps in the given marketplace. If it wants an app boycotted, it can ban it. Otherwise, the incentives are probably not aligned.
- newacct583 6y ago
  > aren't review bombs reviews too? No? I mean, a review is supposed to be an informed opinion of another user of the software telling me whether it meets the expectations its store page sets. If reviews become generic forums for comments on corporate policies then they become useless. I'm with Google here. They provide many forums for people to complain about TikTok already. They certainly shouldn't be forced to do so in app reviews.
- ketzu 6y ago
  I aggree that "review bombs" are reviews too, but they intend to review something different from what is intended: the company creating the product instead of the product. If you intend the reviews to be a help for deciding on the merits of the product, they are noise. Many people consider "didn't fit my purpose 1/5" or "amazon canceled the shipping on me 1/5" reviews as noise, even though they are not useless. I think, "review bombs" are similar.
tw1912112 6y ago
This is a really good case for network effects. If you go through the reviews, a lot of people are complaining that they are not getting any "views" for their content. As more and more people are bombing the reviews, uninstalling, it's discouraging people from creating more content because it's not being viewed enough. Does anyone know if disabling views or delaying gratification of content will reduce the damaging effect on the TikTok network? Also, vis-a-vis Yelp, why should review bombs be removed when I can go to a restaurant and review it as 1-rated if I am not treated well by them even if I don't complete any transaction?
shadowgovt 6y ago
I wonder if there's any signal to disambiguate whether Google decided to kill the reviews or algorithmically determined 5 million accounts were bots, and those bots also happened to have been used in a TikTok brigading campaign.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
Curious, how is India Today generally regarded in India? I ask because to me the style and tone of this article sounds like something that came out of an elementary school newspaper. E.g. "It was still the talk of the town but for all the wrong reasons", "could be the result of Google removing user reviews so that the app could get some balance." The hackneyed cliches and oddly stating a presumption as fact just strike me as extremely juvenile. I'm in no way saying US news is better, and it is often times much worse, but it's usually not worse in the way this article is.
- villgax 6y ago
  It's fine, not great.
- dartharva 6y ago
  It's kind of the state of Indian news media of this generation. All outlets are crazy for making even mundane coverage as dramatic as possible to compete.
- superasn 6y ago
  India today is the most widely circulated magazine in India and had a lot of prominent journalist associated with it. Unfortunately in this day of freelance writers, publications care more about views and speed than quality and this has happened to almost all print media be it Forbes(1) or India today. (1) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=forbes%20quality&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
PunksATawnyFill 6y ago
YouTube and TikTok are cavalcades of human stupidity. Things aren't getting better.
- ketzu 6y ago
  Entertainment is not inherently stupid and videos on both platforms are not inherently entertainment or stupid. They mostly seem like a cross section of overall internet content (minus porn), which represents a large part of society as a whole. For some reason people seem compelled to declare popular things they dislike as stupid, but that seems very unnecessary.
londons_explore 6y ago
I'd take a guess the real explanation is far simpler... Google let's anyone write a review, but if an end-of-week logs analysis shows that you never installed the app, or that the review was written via tor from an account created 30 seconds ago, then it's removed as spam.
- plumeria 6y ago
  Does it work like this for all apps?
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    I guess so
presiozo 6y ago
Seems like every major tech company bows in front of the Chinese government. This is really scary
Proven 6y ago
Like the EU when they influenced member states to redo national referendums. Keep reviewing until you get it right, folks!
OwnsE 6y ago
I thought review manipulation goes against google policy? Or this only applies for apps with a limited budget?

294 points by sdan 6y ago

Were they real reviews, or Indian review-bombs generated as part of a nationalistic campaign to get back at China? Review sections were weaponized long ago, first by companies, and now, increasingly, by nations.

KukicAdnan 6y ago
Indian review-bombs.
katktv 6y ago
Indian review-bombs, but for the other reasons entirely. The dumb ones as well.
mikeywazowski 6y ago
You can judge for yourself. Currently if you sort by 'Most relevant', it looks like about 90% of the reviews are 1 star, by Indian users.

Barrin92 6y ago

>"Another reason was the enraged fans of famous Indian YouTuber Carry Minati flooding PlayStore with 1-star reviews. Carry Minati had created a video titled YouTube Vs TikTok, part of an ongoing feud between YouTube and TikTok users. His video went viral and was taken down for violating YouTube’s terms of service. This happended because many TikTok users reported the video saying it was bullying in nature." Seems reasonable enough to remove those because this is just brigarding and has nothing to do with authentic users of the app.

frequentnapper 6y ago
I happened to watch the video, which was a response to a Tiktok user badmouthing Youtube creators. I didn't really see any bullying, just funny retorts. I guess when it comes to Youtube, they just censor anything as long as enough people complain.
- Carpetsmoker 6y ago
  500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute; it's impossible to moderate all of that. "Lots of users reported it in a short timespan" is a reasonable heuristic to quickly remove ISIS beheading videos and whatnot. It's not perfect, but nothing YouTube does at this kind of scale will be.
  - frequentnapper 6y ago
    Right, but in addition, not providing any transparency to the content creator, or any ability to appeal the decision or re-instate the video in my opinion is unforgivable.
    - Carpetsmoker 6y ago
      Yeah, the entire process of dealing with exceptions (or indeed, anything that involves human judgement) is atrocious at YouTube, and has been for many years. jwz wrote about this years ago as well (and there are many more stories): https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/youtubes-joke-of-a-fair-use-appeal-process/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/youtubes-joke-of-a-fair-use... That being said, I feel too many people fail to appreciate the problems YouTube is facing and are too quick to simply shout "censorship!"
      - thrwaway69 6y ago
        That link calls me a brogrammer man child... My ego is hurt.
  - stonogo 6y ago
    > 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute; it's impossible to moderate all of that. Ironically, I hear about this fact every time Youtube makes the news for ... you know ... moderating all of that.
ashtonkem 6y ago
In principle I can see the argument that this is low quality content that doesn’t help YT at all, but more salient is how unbelievably easy YT’s moderation system is to abuse. For a company proud of their AI chops, their ability to detect astroturfing is pretty weak.
tw1912112 6y ago
I posted in other comment, if I tell you that X restaurant sucks because they have rats everywhere, and you go to that restaurant and actually see the rats and rate it as 1 star on Yelp, are those not authentic users? Who counts as authentic user on TikTok, do the people who have viewed videos created on TikTok but shared on Twitter?
- Barrin92 6y ago
  > f I tell you that X restaurant sucks because they have rats everywhere, and you go to that restaurant and actually see the rats and rate it as 1 star on Yelp, are those not authentic users? Yes they are but that's not what's going on here. The barrage of downvotes in this case was the result of a platform feud between Youtube and TikTok content creators who told their userbases to go and vote the app down, and some sort of issue between India and China. These people likely have not used the app at all, aren't actually evaluating the app itself, and the grievances they have are likely irrelevant to the vast majority of users who look at the rating.
  - tw1912112 6y ago
    That's not true, there are plenty of disturbing videos of men promoting rapes and assaulting them using chemicals. If those videos were restricted to TikTok, that would have been a different case but TikTok actively promotes sharing these videos on other networks and the viewers have authentic concerns. I agree that PlayStore is doing it right by removing the reviews that are related to the service but not pertaining to the Android App itself, but then what counts as "using the app"? Seeing the videos created on TikTok counts as "using the app" or just the experience of the app itself? I would describe those reviews as "non-descriptive" than irrelevant, but yes they are very noisy. It's about the same as rating 4chan on trustpilot. Also, if any country that has banned TikTok, like UAE or Indonesia, because of a different jurisdiction, then it's a valid criticism? If I go to a restaurant, and they only accept Chinese currency, then I would rate it as 1-star since I have only USD and the restaurant is not my preference.
duskwuff 6y ago
I don't think it's even brigading -- that implies that it's at least humans. The app gained somewhere on the order of tens of millions of one-star reviews over a short period of time. To me, that sounds more like someone's generating the one-star reviews.
- square_usual 6y ago
  CarryMinati has nearly 20 million subscribers[1], and he was just one of many... forces, behind the reviews storm. India has over a billion people with at least 500 million smartphone users[2], tens of millions isn't that out of the way. [1] https://socialblade.com/youtube/c/addicteda1 https://socialblade.com/youtube/c/addicteda1 [2] https://www.news18.com/news/tech/smartphone-users-in-india-crossed-500-million-in-2019-states-report-2479529.html https://www.news18.com/news/tech/smartphone-users-in-india-c...
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    > India has over a billion people with at least 500 million smartphone users, tens of millions isn't that out of the way. One out of every fifty or so people in a country the size of India getting involved enough in an Internet fight to download and rate an Android app is pretty hard to believe. 10M is a huge number, even for a big country like India.
    - square_usual 6y ago
      Indians sure as heck don't need motivation to download TikTok; it was downloaded 323 million times in India over last year. https://sensortower.com/blog/tiktok-revenue-downloads-2019 https://sensortower.com/blog/tiktok-revenue-downloads-2019

cscurmudgeon 6y ago

People are discussing this as a China vs India thing. It is not. People recently found that TikTok is extremely lax in dealing with content that promotes violence. https://www.newsweek.com/india-tik-tok-faizal-siddiqui-acid-attack-1505122 https://www.newsweek.com/india-tik-tok-faizal-siddiqui-acid-...

dkdk8283 6y ago
Or Youtube takes an extreme viewpoint banning anything remotely close to content with weapons.
- cscurmudgeon 6y ago
  Tiktok too takes an extreme viewpoint banning anything remotely close to offending China.
  - partiallypro 6y ago
    Yeah, I remember a Tiktocker getting banned for pointing out that China has Muslims in concentration camps and it barely made the news cycle. Tiktok found something else she had also violated and used that as a banning offense...but we all know full well they would have never enforced that were it not for her CCP rant. Tiktok has a lot of creatives on it, but I worry that it's a bit of an infiltration.
sneak 6y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-local-moderation-guidelines-ban-pro-lgbt-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-l...
throwaway46543 6y ago
The last time TikTok was proactive in removing violent content, it got blamed for censorship. There was a girl who posted a video that included pictures of Bin Laden, so TikTok removed it. She then created alt accounts and continued posting. When TikTok removed the video again, the news media said it was because she mentioned Uighurs, when in reality it was because of the Bin Laden pictures.

chipperyman573 6y ago

This really hits on a lot of nerves of the general HN crowd (especially when these things are combined): - Google - "Censorship" (loosely defined) - China (vs India vs a US company, which could really be its own point) But if you read the article it seems to be a logical decision. Google (likely) did something similar for zoom: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/03/24/zooms-android-app-rating-has-been-absolutely-destroyed-by-coronavirus/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/03/24/zooms-android-app-r... Assuming there's nothing left out by the author, I don't really think there's anything newsworthy here, just something that google did that aligns with its past actions (not to say it doesn't belong on HN)

plerpin 6y ago
I swear you could generate a 100% realistic comment thread from a Markov chain of those broad topics.
- Freeboots 6y ago
  https://hncynic.leod.org/ https://hncynic.leod.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694578
  - blauditore 6y ago
    Wow, excerpt of my first attempt with this: > I'm sure Google is planning to release a time machine which can manage the tracking of tasks that I just worked on last year. > I can't tell if it's a "Google Timemachine" or a "Google Tracking App". If they release a "Time TimeMachine", this is a killer feature that will have a huge impact on how people interact with their time. I would be interested to know if this also means that you can just add a "Time TimeMachine" that will do some tracking on the number of meetings you have, or if I want to track your "time."
  - thepete2 6y ago
    that is surprisingly good. I tried "world is ending in the next 2 weeks" and I'm not sure I would recognise them as fake.

mrtweetyhack 6y ago

So Americans need to go give TikTok a - rating, got it.

DigitallyFidget 6y ago

It has only a 1.4 star rating as of right now. It clearly didn't do anything to help the rating of the app.

nsoonhui 6y ago
It could have been far worse had the negative reviews were not removed
- mikeywazowski 6y ago
  The lowest rating is 1 star. 1.4 is almost as bad as you can get.
dzhiurgis 6y ago
Oh wow. Why such difference with iOS store where it’s over 4? Edit: it’s all clearly spam on Google Store
- duskwuff 6y ago
  It's even more obvious on the "lite" version of their app. Within the last month (probably even more recently), the total number of installs nearly doubled, and the rating dropped from a reasonably stable 4.0 to 1.1. https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok_lite/com.zhiliaoapp.musically.go https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok_lite/com.zhil... (Amusingly, the ratings of the other TikTok app, which looks like it might not be available in India, are unaffected: https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok/com.ss.android.ugc.trill https://www.androidrank.org/application/tiktok/com.ss.androi...) I have a very hard time believing that this represents organic user behavior. It seems far more likely that someone's scripted the process of installing and rating the apps.
- quantummkv 6y ago
  The population segment involved in this whole tiktok vs youtube drama mostly uses Android. iOS is not as popular in India as Android mostly due to higher prices.

golemiprague 6y ago

The more interesting question is how to make reviews valid again. There was some liberterianish hope that reviews and ratings could replace regulations and it does work to some extent but not as good as people hoped.

tehlike 6y ago

Google did this as part of review integrity. Doesn't have anything to do with censorship, as far as i can tell. disclaimer: ex-google employee, who did not work in play.

halfjew22 6y ago
Work in play, heh... Silly puns aside though, I definitely agree with your viewpoint.

sloshnmosh 6y ago

The Google Play Store reviews are pretty much worthless and corrupted by ratings farms and app developers that steal the users google credentials to post fake 5 star reviews from within the app itself. There was a time where you didn’t have the option to only view negative reviews. At least that has improved to where users have options in a drop-down menu.

Thorrez 6y ago

>to improve TikTok rating The article gives no evidence of this. Sure the rating improved from 1.2/5 to 1.5/5, but that doesn't mean it's the purpose of the removal.

tiktokVsYoutube 6y ago

Posting from a throwaway account - This article barely scratches the surface. This was a very entertaining story that I followed to the minute and here’s some context: Tiktok content, specifically in India, from the very start has been very[1] very[2] _cringy_ (weird hairstyles, weird things being said, weird ways of expressing friendship, love, etc). I don’t mean the cringe that you associate with western Tiktok content but for some reason majority of what the Indian kids were producing stood out as being beyond cringe to existing internet users (mainly Youtube / Instagram userbase). I suspect this has to do with the millions of first-time internet / smartphone users on Tiktok + the heavy influence of exaggerated emotional Bollywood drama now being done in 15 seconds on a smartphone. Youtube on the other hand obviously had an existing audience that was used to consuming content of a certain level of quality / production. Apart from just pure cringe content, Tiktok obviously did not bother with copyright infringements much and in fact promoted the concept of people plagiarizing each other’s work. So the Youtube / IG communities started making memes and calling out the cringe and bad content of Tiktok. At some point one of the big influencers on Tiktok (Amir Siddiqui referred to in this article) provoked one of the biggest Indian Youtuber, Carryminati who is known for roasting people. Amir made a video saying Tiktok videos require talent, hard work, and a lot more dedication than Youtube videos and basically asked Carry to roast him. Carry then took on the challenge and released an 8-minute roast video that beautifully called out all the cringe that tiktok users make, things that Amir had done in the past, etc. That Youtube roast video set several records within hours. The roast was actually so effective, it was hilarious to browse through Tiktok for the next few days as the entire Tiktok community sort of agreed and started making fun of each other and that single video actually shook the entire Tiktok community. About 5-6 days later, Youtube took down the video (which was now the highest liked video of India by far) without explanation probably after receiving thousands of flags from tiktok users. It’s worth mentioning that the roast included comparisons of Amir to being a eunuch multiple times among other questionable insults because of his past tiktok videos. In my opinion, the video was definitely not trying to be Politically Correct but it wasn’t bad enough to be taken down. Once the video was taken down, the Youtube and Instagram(meme pages) community started a campaign to leave a 1-star rating for Tiktok on the playstore and basically destroyed their rating which was about 4.5 when this started. In case you’re wondering, I am an avid HN reader, an accomplished software engineer but I do spend about 5% of my free time enjoying Indian cringe. In fact I curate a big list of my favorites and share with my friends but very few people actually enjoy the cringe. Was it worth explaining all of this to one of the most intellectually stimulating forums on the internet? Probably not. But I had to admit to myself that I know a lot more about this story than I’m proud to admit and that it would make me happy that it gets saved in the HN archive. A copy of the original video that was taken down by Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZ241zUgbA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZ241zUgbA [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciYohWR2Pio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciYohWR2Pio [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg9gjmcHgE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg9gjmcHgE8

nwienert 6y ago

I just stumbled on a site that heavily leans on the “tech is censoring Trump” angle, namely this article about Google taking down a study on Hydroxycholoquine. I thought of posting it to front page, but instead I can just attach to this other timely thread of Google being evil/censors. Genuinely curious about info people have around this, if it is legit or not. It seems like something you’d have expected to see here front page, but then again this site leans left. https://defyccc.com/google-deleted-covid19-cure-paper/ https://defyccc.com/google-deleted-covid19-cure-paper/

kragen 6y ago
It looks fake. Would a real medical researcher refer to SARS-CoV-2 as "coronavirus" in the title, as if they didn't know there were other common human coronaviruses? Why are they publishing on Google Drive instead of MedrXiv? Why is the last author a lawyer? Why does it say "Stanford PhD" in the byline? Dr. Broker (the first author) does seem to have been doing biomedical research at UAB last year (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336977942_Targeting_DNA_Damage_Response_as_a_Strategy_to_Treat_HPV_Infections/download https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336977942_Targeting... is a legitimate virology research paper he worked on, which doesn't make obvious errors like the above), but https://web.archive.org/web/20200403213718/https://www.uab.edu/medicine/biochem/56-tom-broker-phd https://web.archive.org/web/20200403213718/https://www.uab.e... suggests he was gone by April 3. https://www.peakprosperity.com/forum-topic/chloroquine-hoax/ https://www.peakprosperity.com/forum-topic/chloroquine-hoax/ says he was born in 1944, so he'd be 76? Hmm, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8143845/Malaria-cure-coronavirus-promoter-cryptocurrency-hustler-fake-Stanford-University-claim.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8143845/Malaria-cur... says, "Professor Thomas Broker, who was named in the 'white paper' before it was removed from Google, asked for his name to be disassociated with it, while the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he works, said a claim that Nobel Prize winner Dr. Louise Chow's laboratory was involved was also false." "…the university's public relations manager Bob Shepard added that Dr. Chow, a Nobel-prize winner mentioned in the acknowledgments, was no part of the study. "'No one at UAB has any connection to this paper,' Shepard said. "Shepard said that Broker 'had previously done research into chloroquine as a possible therapy for human papillomavirus' which is more commonly known as HPV. "Shepard said: 'He had some contact with one of the authors of that paper at that time. He had no involvement with the work on coronavirus and is not affiliated with that research in any way.'" Now, I don't want to depend on the Daily Mail, but it seems like they may happen to have been correct in this case.

kumarvvr 6y ago

I understand the need to remove "review bombs", but aren't review bombs reviews too? Say a company that develops a product says or does something insensitive, in the earlier days, people would publicly boycott that product, related products or what have you. The company would either stand down and apologize, or put it's foot down and say it's right. Now picture the same thing with Tik-Tok. There are innumerable instances where Tik-tok has been shown to be biased, censors specific content, etc etc. Review bombing is as good as boycotting a company. Causing a company real consequences in response to their actions. It's a form of rightful protest. I am not using the product. I am expressing my views about the product in a review system that is public and open. As long as there are no bots involves, Google is morally wrong, in my view.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
The point of a reviews from an app store's perspective is to help users decide whether they would benefit from an app. That some subreddit or Twitter or whatever decides to brigade a particular app does not necessarily provide much signal about whether a generic user will want an app. An app marketplace is not generally going to be interested in facilitating boycotts on apps in the given marketplace. If it wants an app boycotted, it can ban it. Otherwise, the incentives are probably not aligned.
newacct583 6y ago
> aren't review bombs reviews too? No? I mean, a review is supposed to be an informed opinion of another user of the software telling me whether it meets the expectations its store page sets. If reviews become generic forums for comments on corporate policies then they become useless. I'm with Google here. They provide many forums for people to complain about TikTok already. They certainly shouldn't be forced to do so in app reviews.
ketzu 6y ago
I aggree that "review bombs" are reviews too, but they intend to review something different from what is intended: the company creating the product instead of the product. If you intend the reviews to be a help for deciding on the merits of the product, they are noise. Many people consider "didn't fit my purpose 1/5" or "amazon canceled the shipping on me 1/5" reviews as noise, even though they are not useless. I think, "review bombs" are similar.

tw1912112 6y ago

This is a really good case for network effects. If you go through the reviews, a lot of people are complaining that they are not getting any "views" for their content. As more and more people are bombing the reviews, uninstalling, it's discouraging people from creating more content because it's not being viewed enough. Does anyone know if disabling views or delaying gratification of content will reduce the damaging effect on the TikTok network? Also, vis-a-vis Yelp, why should review bombs be removed when I can go to a restaurant and review it as 1-rated if I am not treated well by them even if I don't complete any transaction?

shadowgovt 6y ago

I wonder if there's any signal to disambiguate whether Google decided to kill the reviews or algorithmically determined 5 million accounts were bots, and those bots also happened to have been used in a TikTok brigading campaign.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

Curious, how is India Today generally regarded in India? I ask because to me the style and tone of this article sounds like something that came out of an elementary school newspaper. E.g. "It was still the talk of the town but for all the wrong reasons", "could be the result of Google removing user reviews so that the app could get some balance." The hackneyed cliches and oddly stating a presumption as fact just strike me as extremely juvenile. I'm in no way saying US news is better, and it is often times much worse, but it's usually not worse in the way this article is.

villgax 6y ago
It's fine, not great.
dartharva 6y ago
It's kind of the state of Indian news media of this generation. All outlets are crazy for making even mundane coverage as dramatic as possible to compete.
superasn 6y ago
India today is the most widely circulated magazine in India and had a lot of prominent journalist associated with it. Unfortunately in this day of freelance writers, publications care more about views and speed than quality and this has happened to almost all print media be it Forbes(1) or India today. (1) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=forbes%20quality&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

PunksATawnyFill 6y ago

YouTube and TikTok are cavalcades of human stupidity. Things aren't getting better.

ketzu 6y ago
Entertainment is not inherently stupid and videos on both platforms are not inherently entertainment or stupid. They mostly seem like a cross section of overall internet content (minus porn), which represents a large part of society as a whole. For some reason people seem compelled to declare popular things they dislike as stupid, but that seems very unnecessary.

londons_explore 6y ago

I'd take a guess the real explanation is far simpler... Google let's anyone write a review, but if an end-of-week logs analysis shows that you never installed the app, or that the review was written via tor from an account created 30 seconds ago, then it's removed as spam.

plumeria 6y ago
Does it work like this for all apps?
- londons_explore 6y ago
  I guess so

presiozo 6y ago

Seems like every major tech company bows in front of the Chinese government. This is really scary

Proven 6y ago

Like the EU when they influenced member states to redo national referendums. Keep reviewing until you get it right, folks!

OwnsE 6y ago

I thought review manipulation goes against google policy? Or this only applies for apps with a limited budget?