A warning about Glassdoor • Hacker News Board

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#31

Post by zerop » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #20

Every organization that accepts reviews from "users" about goods/services/employment provided by organizations eventually seems to run into a conflict of interest between their stated purpose and their finances. This is true of Yelp, BBB, and now, I guess, Glassdoor. This is why organizations like this are not a replacement for government enforced labor and consumer rights. Once an organization establishes a strong b…

Do you think Quora also does it or might do in future? I would trust Quora more looking at the founding team.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#32

Post by Dig1t » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

This sounds like a market opportunity. If Glassdoor has pivoted to shilling for other corporations, someone should turn around and make a site that allows honest negative reviews of companies.

Anyone interested?

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#33

Post by zerop » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

Do you think Quora also does it or might do in future? I would trust Quora more.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#34

Post by skybrian » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #20

Every organization that accepts reviews from "users" about goods/services/employment provided by organizations eventually seems to run into a conflict of interest between their stated purpose and their finances. This is true of Yelp, BBB, and now, I guess, Glassdoor. This is why organizations like this are not a replacement for government enforced labor and consumer rights. Once an organization establishes a strong b…

Government regulation has its own obvious failure modes (various kinds of corruption, industry capture, or underfunding), so you can't say one is always better than the other. It all depends. There is no guaranteed solution. Hopefully some better Glassdoor competitor will come along.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#35

Post by b0rsuk » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

I've been pondering this idea. STEAL IT! Build a service that only hosts comments that were deleted from popular sites. Then for any given youtube channel or company review you'd be able to check what kinds of comments are deleted over there.

Are there any legal issues to this?

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#36

Post by ShakataGaNai » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

celdon25 wrote: post #3

In 2016, I wrote a scathing, negative Glassdoor review about a company that truly was a developer sweatshop. It had only 1 review at the time. The review got close to 50 upvotes and was one of the top Google search results for the company name. A second negative review came up not too long after that. Within weeks, the company had at least 20 5 star reviews added to this. The entirety of the company was no more than…

This is true of most companies reviews. If they are reasonably small enough (say under 500 to 1000 employees), they all have the same pattern (chronologically): Sparse to no reviews for a while. One or two negative reviews. A few days to weeks later... a huge influx of positive reviews for a few days. Then back to nothing.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#37

Post by andrei_says_ » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

alisonatwork wrote: post #15

My eyes opened to this after leaving my last company. They announced layoffs shortly after I quit and Glassdoor was inundated with a flood of long, detailed reviews expressing concern and unhappiness around all the issues that had caused me to leave voluntarily. The company's star rating dropped from 3.5ish to 3 and was trending down. Then, mysteriously, within the space of a week, almost all of the negative reviews…

If only they would be willing to leave the extra money they get for manipulating public opinion on the table, right?

But it’s so easy! And so profitable!

Joking aside, the reviewing-anything niche is getting very difficult in the age of sock puppet accounts. Any platform sooner or later becomes a space for dispute, manipulation and outright war between entities with competing agendas and no ethics.

It’s a very difficult space to provide a good service - there are enough players ready to say anything and poison the well.

We live in the era of everyone getting a dip in distorting reality :(

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#38

Post by alexcroox » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

This is the same for sites like Checkatrade. The business owners can remove negative reviews which makes the entire site worthless.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#39

Post by b0rsuk » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

alisonatwork wrote: post #15

My eyes opened to this after leaving my last company. They announced layoffs shortly after I quit and Glassdoor was inundated with a flood of long, detailed reviews expressing concern and unhappiness around all the issues that had caused me to leave voluntarily. The company's star rating dropped from 3.5ish to 3 and was trending down. Then, mysteriously, within the space of a week, almost all of the negative reviews…

I suspect it was a bait&switch scheme all along.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#40

Post by tartoran » Thu, Oct 15, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

kaffee wrote: post #13

astuyvenberg wrote: post #6

It'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.

No, Yelp was extorting a friend's small food business. He had lots of 5 star reviews, but only a handful of bad reviews (supposedly made up) were showing up on the main page. Yelp contacted him at some point and offered to fix the reviews if he signed some kind of contract with them that amounted to around $2000 of monthly advertising on their site. He told them on the phone he couldn't afford that, he was a small business guy. Couple of days later 2 corporate guys in suits came down to his business, uninvited, to talk business which of course still didn't make sense, nothing had changed and he could not afford that type of money. He ran some numbers in his head and asked if they could send him business instead and make a cut, but their offer wasn't guaranteeing any new business, just crappy advertising on yelp. The bad reviews not only stayed on but started to multiply he turned yelp's offer down. Yelp is not anybody's friend and their business model is very unhealthy. I'm not surprised others review companies such as glassdoor resort to similar tactics. These are proconsumer in the beginning stages then they get corrupted.