A warning about Glassdoor

A distributed trust network is a really interesting hard problem but does seem solvable in some ways (as seen by blockchains, though they have their own issues).

I've wondered if a somewhat simplistic graph based solution could work, inspired by organizations like medieval guilds and the mafia, where you generally need to be invited to the trust network and promoted to be more trusted within the network as others vouch for your trustworthiness. Suspicious users are highly punished (in the real life examples, often violently) and quickly removed from the network.

Obviously can be gamed like any other system, but would be much harder to do so and you can leverage the vouch/invite graph to detect trusted users that are highly connected to suspicious ones.

Surely there's something like this out there, though? Or is this just not a valuable business problem to solve?

> extort - (transitive) To take or seize off an unwilling person by physical force, menace, duress, torture, or any undue or illegal exercise of power or ingenuity.

This is taking money from an unwilling person by duress, using an undue exercise of power (ie control of bad reviews on their platform).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/extort

I want a review site where I can only see reviews from people I have vetted (could be pseudonymous).

Well I don't want to suggest this is the whole answer, but game theory in economics and evolution tend to say that signalling has to be expensive in order to be honest.

So peacock's feathers and money-back guarantees are the type of thing that people often quote as signalling fitness.

The point of Glassdoor or any other review site it to make signalling cheap and reliable, so it's trying to square a circle.

Word-of-mouth still has the your-rep-on-the-line quality if the person is somewhat close to you, and the decision is something important. Your buddy will say bad things about you if you recommend a crappy employee to them. A random stranger might not hear from you again, and knows that when you tell them this person is the best thing since sliced bread.

In general, "How expensive is it for them to say this?" is a useful heuristic that you should pay attention to. It can give interesting results in several life situations:

- School counselling. Once you're out the door of your school, the career counsellor is not gonna hear much from you. They say they care, and it sounds like they do (genuinely, I had one who was like the school mom), but at the end of the day they both don't know anything about careers other than "teacher" and they aren't affected by you not being able to find a job with your degree of choice. It does affect them that you get into a top uni, everyone wants credit for the Ivy League kids.

- Every internet review but non-famous people. See the other comments.

- Salespeople can be divided into relationship and transactional. If they guy is on the phone with you every day, his advice needs to not be crap. This can make it pretty defensive and useless. OTOH if he vanished once the sale is done, that's useless another way.

- If someone says something that harms their own interests, that's honest. Of course be sure you understand their interest.

- Life advice. Often if there's a great psychological cost, there's a story worth listening to. Painful things like why someone got divorced, especially if they paint themselves in a negative light, can often be trusted, or are at least worthwhile to listen to. Coming of age stories where something crappy happened because the narrator did something stupid, similar. Lottery winning stories of various sorts are often not, you can tell when the inevitable "I fought the odds" part arrives that it falls flat.

  Unfortunately that still chills legitimate negative reviews. 

That is true, but it is a question of degree.

If my legal name is attached to a review, I, personally, will not post ever.

If I know the only way someone can find my legal name is to subpoena some midwestern chain of brick&mortar notaries, I will post sometimes.

Like you, I don't think there is a perfect solution: as a sender, one wants privacy, but as a receiver, one wants transparency. We need some sort of compromise that one can accept for either role.