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A warning about Glassdoor

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Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#121

Post by elwell »

sharadov wrote: post #16
seibelj wrote: post #10

Glassdoor is extortion-as-a-service. They routinely called up two previous places I worked and offered to remove bad reviews if we paid them, which we declined. One of the bad reviews eventually became prominently featured. To be honest it wouldn't surprise me if they wrote the review themselves, that's how scummy I feel this company is. Totally garbage business model, and if anyone reading this works there I hope yo…

They are becoming Yelp.

I heard that Yelp lets you pay to have bad reviews sorted towards the bottom. I recently listened to a podcast episode [0], where the CEO claimed that is not true. Would be interested in evidence on either side.

[0] - https://www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918845338/how-i-built-resilie...

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#122

Post by wslh »

lhorie wrote: post #113
nickbauman wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've come full circle. Word of mouth is all you can trust. The Internet as a great "disintermediation" medium is over.

I take a different stance: the scientific method is all you can trust. Word of mouth is also inherently biased (e.g. someone that works somewhere may paint a rosier picture at a moderate enough company due to in-group dynamics or even mild forms of stockholm syndrome, just as a ex-employee might be overly negative, and it's up to us to identify potential sources of biases in these anecdotes and take them with the app…

Not clear how you will apply a scientific method to a site that can hide, convince, bribe, censor, etc users so the information you gather is incomplete to have a good analysis. More when people have a short focus span and a scientific method is complex.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#123

Post by InitialLastName »

speeder wrote: post #9

Today 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…

> But Netflix for example can't piss off the movie companies or they risk losing their catalog

More than that, Netflix needs your eyes on their service, as opposed to the (dozen?) other competing, equally shoddy services. What you watch makes no difference to their bottom line... the only thing that matters is that you don't see a bad review on Netflix and switch to another streaming service (because if you do that too often, you might decide to remove Netflix from your list of $10/month services).

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#124

Post by elwell »

b0rsuk wrote: post #35

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?

Hmm... crawl archive.org?

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#126

Post by eigenvalue »

It's the same problem with bond rating agencies getting paid by bond issuers instead of bond investors. Of course this ends up happening-- the incentive structure all but guarantees it.

I think Glassdoor's service is useful enough, particularly for someone who is actively considering working for a specific company, that a version of the same idea (not Glassdoor, but a new company offering reviews of companies/management teams) could make sense with a limited subscription model. For example, a one-time membership for 3 months for $5.00 that automatically terminates, or maybe $10/year for an automatically renewing subscription. And if you submit your own review that receives enough "upvotes" or whatever the mechanism is, you can accrue credits that can be used towards the membership cost. I would probably sign up for that myself.

Also, to keep the system honest and fair, the company being reviewed should have the right to respond specifically to any review to make their case, and this should be free for them to do so long as they can prove they represent the company.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#127

Post by fogetti »

seibelj wrote: post #10

Glassdoor is extortion-as-a-service. They routinely called up two previous places I worked and offered to remove bad reviews if we paid them, which we declined. One of the bad reviews eventually became prominently featured. To be honest it wouldn't surprise me if they wrote the review themselves, that's how scummy I feel this company is. Totally garbage business model, and if anyone reading this works there I hope yo…

It seems to me that the bad reviews were published on the site regardless of their offer. So I can't see how is this extortion.

Extortion would be along the lines of "we publish some made up bad reviews unless you pay".

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#128

Post by redisman »

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…

I've seen this happen at a previous place I worked at too. One extremely on-point and constructive review with low stars and tons of likes that was then followed by a flood of junk 5 star reviews that obviously the CEO or his lieutenants wrote. There doesn't seem to be any way to combat those fake reviews now.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#129

Post by fakedang »

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…

Ahh, I remember the good old days of Zomato extorting our restaurant. Zomato's rep offered to give us a 5 star rating if we gave him free takeaway food, or a 3 star rating otherwise, during the initial listing. We obviously gave him the free food, but I thought I would be a wise-ass and decided to record him. Posted it online, but turns out, Zomato's doing that with every restaurant, so it didn't become much news at the end of the day.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#130

Post by vkou »

kaffee wrote: post #65
DoctorOW wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks. This makes some sense. 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).

> The money has to come from somewhere.

It can come from advertising in-app/sponsored results appearing at the top of search. That's not extortionate, and doesn't compromise the whole purpose of using the app.

Either the ROI on those ads is terrible (Thus leading to low-margin businesses not advertising on Yelp), or they want more money, at the expense of long-term confidence in their website.

It's possible that the current, bloated version of Yelp, with a headcount of 6,000 cannot survive on search ads revenue. [1] It's also possible that a smaller, leaner version of it could.

[1] Facebook, by the way, employs ~40,000 FTEs. Facebook's revenues are 70 times that of Yelp's.

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