Glassdoor == Yelp == “top places to work” == every other business that revolves around curating a group of people to promote and extort in equal measures.
A warning about Glassdoor
21–30 of 342 posts
Re: A warning about Glassdoor
#22It's the exact same play as Yelp - once they grew out of the community review forum stage, they turn to extortion to make it profitable.
Is this true? I thought Yelp still did a decent job of moderating reviews.
Yelp is adamant that they don't affect reviews based on payment. That said the order and selection of reviews on preview pages in terms of positive vs. negative are based on how much a business pays.
Re: A warning about Glassdoor
#23Today I was thinking about this kind of thing, for example Epic not allowing reviews at all, Valve "off topic" review hiding, metacritic changes to their system, or Netflix removing their review system... I concluded that review systems often are on the losing side when their income comes from what they are reviewing, reviews you can trust are those that are unrelated. For example a famous bastion of review is the Mi…
Consumer's Reports is the canonical example of a review site where the incentives line up correctly. The only way they make money is by selling memberships, so the consumer and the customer are the same people.
Re: A warning about Glassdoor
#24In response to people in this thread claiming Glassdoor will remove reviews if you pay them:
Maybe our company was just unlucky with the sales rep assigned to our profile, but altering reviews was something they made clear would not happen regardless of if we paid or not.
At the time our company was getting negative reviews meant for a different company in a different country with a similar name. It was a major hassle to convince Glassdoor the bad reviews weren’t legitimate. Eventually they were removed but it required a lot of persistence emailing / calling them every week and providing evidence the reviewers never worked for our company. Meanwhile we were stringing their sales person along hoping that would make it easier, but I don’t think our sales rep had any sway.
I dislike Glassdoor especially for small companies where 1 unhappy person on a team of 15 can ruin their employers reputation from the perspective of future hires. IMO they shouldn’t allow reviews on public company profiles until there is a critical mass of reviews such that any 1 review won’t dramatically swing the star rating.
Re: A warning about Glassdoor
#25May I suggest that in this case the poster’s real problem was that he posted an identical review elsewhere, which is indicative of not behavior and will leak information about GD members which GD will then take the blame for?
Not suggesting GD is all wine and roses but they may have a point here.
Re: A warning about Glassdoor
#26I'll admit that I was bit by Glassdoor astroturfing. The company had an almost 4-star average review and the first three pages were glowing 4 and 5 star reviews.
My first week at the company was nothing like the great workplace describe on Glassdoor. I'll spare the details, but suffice to say it was the most abusive workplace I've ever seen.
Later, I realized that all of the 4 and 5 star Glassdoor reviews started after a specific date and arrived in a short burst. If I went back far enough, the reviews were consistently 1 or 2 stars.
I tried to leave a fair 2-star review using the most dry and basic facts without any exaggeration or hyperbole. It stayed up for a month before disappearing without explanation.
Glassdoor is not a place to find honest company reviews.
Re: A warning about Glassdoor
#27It's better to cross-check rather than relying on a single source. Another option is Blind. Sometimes people also leave workplace reviews at Google.
Re: A warning about Glassdoor
#28Today I was thinking about this kind of thing, for example Epic not allowing reviews at all, Valve "off topic" review hiding, metacritic changes to their system, or Netflix removing their review system... I concluded that review systems often are on the losing side when their income comes from what they are reviewing, reviews you can trust are those that are unrelated. For example a famous bastion of review is the Mi…
Consumer's Reports is the canonical example of a review site where the incentives line up correctly. The only way they make money is by selling memberships, so the consumer and the customer are the same people.
Manufacturers either on purpose, or by accident, have made Consumer Reports reviews not super useful, at least from my experience.
The ability to match a product reviewed by Consumer Reports to something I can actual purchase has become pretty difficult over the years. This would be less a problem if brands followed some kind of trend in overall reliability, but it seems like individual models vary widely in quality even within a specific brand.
So when it comes down to trying to find the specific model of something being reviewed, it seems like that model was discontinued, replaced, or not available at the retailers I use.
Re: A warning about Glassdoor
#29... and then we realize that marketing, corruption, manipulation, extortion, influencers, bots and mechanical-Turks have finally taken control of the promise of "knowledge of the crowds". Putin's goons on Facebook, bots on Twitter, Yelp's "algorithm" being used to extort merchants, personal brand management on LinkedIn, black-hat hackers on HN and Reddit, ... why should Glassdoor be different?
"Wisdom of crowds" as described in early internet essays is only sustainable when the crowds are motivated by some intrinsic purpose and not by financial gain. Financial incentives applied to "the crowd" generally lead to spam, rating extortion, and various other corruption.
Re: A warning about Glassdoor
#30Luckily, it's pretty easy to spot fake reviews on Glassdoor. Unfortunately though, it kind of ruins the experience for most people. The two big mobile app stores have been flooded with spam reviews for over 5 years now unchecked. For those that know how to spot fake reviews, it's easy to tell which apps are not legit. For most consumers though, they just believe what they see.
> Luckily, it's pretty easy to spot fake reviews on Glassdoor.
Could you elaborate? How?