181–190 of 342 posts
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> offered to remove bad reviews if we paid them
Yes. You are right. That is not extortion.
Whatever you'd like to call it, it's scummy behavior and they deserve to lose any market share they've gained by misleading users about their service.
They took down my negative review of a business, asking me to change it despite it being factually correct (I was reporting fraudulent bait-and-switch tactics used by a German air travel site), while they left a bunch of clearly suspect 5-star reviews, thus skewing the overall score of what was clearly a fraud of a service.
The best part: the link that takes you from the vendor's Trustpilot page to their service is a referral link.
The whole 'independent' review service concept is inherently flawed for at least two reasons: a disproportionate number of bad reviews (people will more likely go to such a service to vent their frustration about, rather then to lavish praise on a vendor), and a dependency on advertisement revenue, often coming from the very subjects of the reviews that you are featuring.
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We've come full circle. Word of mouth is all you can trust. The Internet as a great "disintermediation" medium is over.
> We've come full circle. Word of mouth is all you can trust. 5 years ago on HN someone would have said this is an industry ripe to be 'disrupted'. It can't be hard to create a new review site? Easy VC money, an exit within 5 years by acquisition from Yelp or Glassdoor or LinkedIn/MS.
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.
Per this, that means they only allow non-professional reviews on their platform. So if one professional sees flaws/someone getting duped, they're helpless to point it out.
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Online review systems are dead. Surely some must still be valid, but the well is poisoned, and nothing can be trusted.
We've come full circle. Word of mouth is all you can trust. The Internet as a great "disintermediation" medium is over.
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…
I've thought it's always been easy to spot the fake reviews that are five stars and clearly only use up the minimum characters for the pros and cons. I just assumed they came from real employees compelled by HR to help pump up the overall rating, rather than review farms and wherever astroturfing comes from.
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This is just my personal interpretation, but the way I approach is I create a trustworthiness score for the set of reviews. For example, too many 5 stars without comments and without low stars might earn a low trustworthiness score because the distribution looks unnatural compared to the distribution in similar competitors. Or a set of 6 reviews, no matter their distribution will also receive a low trustworthiness sc…
The problem I see with that approach is that modern transformer based NLP like GPT3 make generating this sort of "review" text almost free. The value you place in those reviews is the perceived effort put into them. When that effort goes to zero... it's just more automated spam reviews with a "believable" statistical spectrum. Honestly, I don't see how to trust reviews if the reviewers have no skin in the game (eithe…
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Seems like most web based anything sees rapid steps back due to ease of gaming the system.
I think the issue is the question of moderation - it's really trivial to throw up a discussion board on the web, but moderating that discussion board is where things get hairy since everyone wants to keep out the trolls but it can be hard to tell a legitimately fraudulent review from one a company claims is fraudulent - and there are extremely strong incentives to always believe the company since they've got the mone…
It's the whole web thinking pattern. Make everything accessible, fast and free. Nobody makes money like this, and thus the system produced has no added value. It will devolve into whatever low hanging fruit can live on the inertia of branding and trends. Until someone makes an article like the one above, then someone else will try.
If I want to rant, I'd say 10 years later someone will make a real system to grade things, and it will require serious work and serious money (think about banking grades) then the system will be kept in place (to an extent.. think about banking grades).