61–70 of 342 posts
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?
Since then the page has become littered with reviews that are somewhat obviously fake. Most of them are written in a vaguely shielded corporate tone and they simply don’t have enough former employees with a positive opinion of them to have this kind of sudden influx of responses.
Glassdoor has thoroughly outlived its usefulness and I can’t say that I will be basing any of my decisions on who to join on it in the future.
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?
The problem is that if it gets too successful then it's easy for companies to classify emails from the Team Blind domain as spam. Having said this, if that happens then that might already be a yellow flag on the part of the employee.
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…
Online review systems are dead. Surely some must still be valid, but the well is poisoned, and nothing can be trusted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Honestly, I'm sympathetic to Yelp. The money has to come from somewhere. And there's at least superficial evidence that you cannot operate a honest review platform at a reasonable profit rate (e.g., glassdoor, consumer reports).
1)Fake reviews are an actual hard problem to solve. Good reviews can really make or break your company so the incentive to game the systems is quite high.
Positive reviews for your own company, negative reviews for your competitor, or cunningly, clearly fake positive reviews for competitors to get them in trouble with the review site.
2)Incentives lead these review-centric companies to some bad outcomes (or at least the lack of trust by consumers). Interestingly, companies with better revenue models outside of the reviews may end up building the most trust among consumers.
I would think Google is very well positioned here. Both because they don't need to get the $$ from scammy tactics and because their user data can help them find fake reviews much more easily. Did user XXX use Google Maps to get directions to the location? Did user XXX get an emailed receipt from that company?
I think Glassdoor's concept is excellent, but the business model ensures employees or employees can't trust it.
I absolutely love when companies do this. I'm seemingly permabanned from certain Amazon products for reasons that no one will tell me. Some people have had similar issues, and a small subset seem to have gotten through via persistently harassing certain lines, but I don't have the energy.
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…
How does Angie's List perform in this regard? The user (i.e. review writer/reader) pays, not the business being reviewed. In theory, that forces the incentives to align correctly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's middle-ground between for-profit corporations and government. There are social purpose corporations, benefit corporations, non-profits, cooperatives, etc.
Too bad people are so used to getting things for "free" on the web these days, or it could do a much better job.