> My concern is that overall, the product and marketing seem to be geared towards speculative, short-term trading. When I first signed up, the app was recommending that I check out stocks like Apple, Netflix, and Snapchat, not index funds.

There's a broad spectrum of public companies obviously, but it's hard to see $AAPL as speculative in the same sense that people call penny stocks or cryptocurrencies speculative (i.e. much, much more risk involved in the latter two). Investing in large cap equities isn't the stupidest thing you could be doing as a new investor - that award would certainly go to buying derivatives.

And indeed if I have criticism of RH it's that they're trying to appeal to all investor types at the same time, new and experienced alike. It's easy to see how new investors can get confused when RH offers the ability to sign up for cryptocurrency trading and options trading, two things new investors obviously should not be doing (though admittedly there's obviously a questionnaire involved before you can be approved for options trading, not sure about cryptocurrencies).

I can understand why they guide people towards investing in "hip" companies versus an index fund, but regardless why is their so much animosity towards robinhood on HN? Is someone getting into investing and investing in an Apple/Amazon/etc. not overall a pretty good entry point compared to opening up thinkorswim or the pretty atrocious (at least on mac) schwab desktop client? Investing a small amount of money is better than blowing that money on tons of consumeristic bullshit that that tons of people do and RH seems like a genuinely good stepping stone compared to the current incumbents in a lot of ways (fees/minimum deposit/super simple). The fact that you can even start with RH and then at a later date transfer to a brokerage once you have a large enough portfolio is also a huge plus in my opinion to people who may have otherwise never set aside that money in the first place.