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Comment by kleton | Hacker News Reader

Each FINRA arbitration case would be expected to cost the company up to 10,000 in fees. If anywhere near the 100,000 users who left negative reviews on the Google Play store for the app file an arbitration and pay the filing fee, Robinhood will absolutely go bankrupt.

If you are/were a Robinhood user: https://www.finra.org/arbitration-mediation/initiate-arbitra...

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Some previous (flagged) discussion about the Patreon mass arbitration story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24016732

Submitting a negative review is a lot less effort than dealing with a court case. I think it’s unlikely a small percentage of 100,000 will pursue.

You’re talking about people who banded together to drive up share prices. They’ve already demonstrated an ability and willingness to coordinate.

But they are probably still not the majority of its users. Anyway, Robinhood is likely dead in the long run.

But remember the arbitration problem that doordash faced when a law firm created an easy-to-arbitrate system for workers?

just do a web search for "arbitration backfired"

you'll find this and other interesting cases :)

If 1% do that’s 1,000,000...

That’s a whole 6 hours of profit. They’re at almost $1 bill in annual revenue for 2020.

>court case

I thought it is arbitration (which is less effort than a court case)

And under California law consumers cannot be forced to bear those costs.

IIRC, customers still have to pay the filing fee, but beyond that, the costs are on the company.

For what it's worth, arbitration filing fees can be calculated at https://tools.finra.org/arbitration_calculator/ - they seem to start at $50 for specified damages, and $1575 for unspecified damages. (Obligatory: not a lawyer, not at all recommending that anyone do this without consulting one.)

I think there's a very good chance the reviews were not organic, but instead automated.

You can automate arbitration filings for users just as easily. Can’t wipe away 100k arbitration requests as easily as the same amount of negative reviews.

I’d even contribute financially to have such an app built, because if FINRA and the SEC won't act (no surprise!), citizens can and should.

Got any evidence for that?

Some circumstantial evidence would be the apple app scores not having the same magnitude of response.

Highly doubt that, and wonder why you'd even think that - it's a pretty big movement with vocal users, submitting a review because you got scammed (which is what happened) is a very low threshold.

I highly doubt that. I filed a 1 star review and it literally only took like 30 seconds as you don't have to write anything to rate it.

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