Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A warning about Glassdoor

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 342 posts

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#271

Post by np- »

Diederich wrote: post #247
everdrive wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Online review systems are dead. Surely some must still be valid, but the well is poisoned, and nothing can be trusted.

My wife and I used to use Yelp at our go-to, day to day review platform. After some of my wife's customers directly experienced some serious WTF behaviour on Yelp's part, our trust in it was, as you said, completely broken. I'm not at all surprised that Glassdoor is playing similar games. The following isn't necessarily meant to disagree with you. A common thread is that Yelp and Glassdoor directly make money based o…

A counter argument is that if Google doesn’t care enough to manipulate its reviews because the stakes are too low, then they might also turn a blind eye to restaurants, businesses, and other listings manipulating the system themselves (again assuming it’s too small time for Google to care).

But I don’t have a better solution either, my wife and I have followed almost your exact same pattern of relying on Yelp until it became untrustworthy and then Google Reviews (which is what I still use now).

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#272

Post by darepublic »

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…

It's because they use an antipattern for monetizing... Start with it free and then make it simultaneously crappier and not free. Improve quality and charge a humble amount for it. That's all this idea in this form is worth imo

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#273

Post by phaedryx »

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 had a similar situation. My negative review was removed about a month after I left it, which was after the period allowed to go back and edit it.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#274

Post by ahelwer »

Diederich wrote: post #247
everdrive wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Online review systems are dead. Surely some must still be valid, but the well is poisoned, and nothing can be trusted.

My wife and I used to use Yelp at our go-to, day to day review platform. After some of my wife's customers directly experienced some serious WTF behaviour on Yelp's part, our trust in it was, as you said, completely broken. I'm not at all surprised that Glassdoor is playing similar games. The following isn't necessarily meant to disagree with you. A common thread is that Yelp and Glassdoor directly make money based o…

I've personally seen my (and others') negative google reviews removed. I reposted mine since I'd saved it; we'll see how long it stays up.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#276

Post by solveit »

cranium wrote: post #254
lordnacho wrote: post #197

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-m…

It's too bad that giving critical feedback in your own name (to show skin in the game) is going to burn you in other jobs. Few want an employee that can bite the feeding hand. Interestingly, I tend to trust more some anonymous answer on Quora because the person won't get any upvotes to display on their profile so (hopefully) their only incentive was sharing their story.

That's why you shouldn't show skin in the game unless you actually have skin in the game. That is, you should have upside.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#277

Post by TeMPOraL »

tshaddox wrote: post #265
berkes wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From this I get you mean "word of mouth" in a very physical way? As in "my cousin Jane says..."? Because "Word of mouth" over the internet would imply that The Internet still has a big role to play in disintermediation. Would "reviews" from your network, any network, physical, or digital, of people you know, be valuable? I believe that a "review" is only useful if you know the reviewer well enough. Regardless of the…

I think "word of mouth" just means opinions about products that are communicated to you via a network of acquaintances, acquaintances of acquaintances, etc. that is very unlikely to have any underlying commercial incentives. That communication can obviously still happen over the internet. The point is that when you're looking for a toaster oven and your friend says that his coworker's spouse just got a ToasterGenius…

Not only you can trust the opinion is genuine, you can also gauge it.

You probably know your friend well enough to tell if they know anything about toasters or evaluating consumer products in general, and whether their views and needs corresponds to yours. So you rate the recommendation for ToasterGenius Model Z somewhere on the scale from "my friend is a bona fide toaster expert / fanatic", through "my friend toasts as much as I do and is attentive", all the way to "my friend doesn't know first thing about toasters, and also doesn't understand the concept of communicating uncertainty about one's beliefs".

This kind of ability is what makes word-of-mouth within your social network super useful. On top of that, if your friend ends up purposefully shilling for a MLM, they're doing that at the risk of immediately burning your friendship.

(Tangential: MLMs are social cancer that prey on relationships between friends and family members; they should be excised from this planet.)

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#278

Post by RobertKerans »

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…

At job before last, we were offered a large bar of Cadbury's chocolate (a 200g Dairy Milk if I remember correctly) as a sweetener (hoho) for writing a Glassdoor review. Which would be written and emailed to the person who came up with the wheeze and...

anyway, afaik all those chocolate bars are still in a cupboard somewhere at the offices

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#279

Post by solveit »

corty wrote: post #238
whimsicalism wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain can't be "forced" to remove a review. Not how that works. You can force a public facing site to stop displaying it, but if it's decentralized it is still there. The disadvantage being of course there is no way to remove fake/scam reviews.

You usually build a chain of hashes of messages, not of the messages themselves. Meaning that you can delete the message, leaving evidence of the deletion in the form of a lonely hash in the chain.

Yes, but if uncensorability is a feature you want, there's nothing stopping you (other than the enormous cost[1]) from using the messages themselves.

[1]: Not necessarily a deal-breaker. For perspective, consider that a 10-word transatlantic telegram in 1860 cost the equivalent of $2600 in 2013 USD.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#280

Post by [deleted] »

reificator wrote: post #158
ProAm wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If the fundamental problem is trust, are you really suggesting that "it can't be hard to create" that trust?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN