A warning about Glassdoor • Hacker News Board

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#311

Post by zoomablemind » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 1:51 AM UTC

bartread wrote: post #159

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 wonder how new a phenomenon this really is. It's certainly been possible to get reviews taken down for many years. Some time ago I worked for a company where I did a stint as a technical recruiter before moving into an interim head of IT role to tide them over whilst we hired someone permanent. One of the people I'd been instrumental in hiring whilst I was technical recruiter went on to join the company during my t…

> ...within a couple of days the extremely negative review had been taken down, and I was grateful to them for taking it down.

They literally just took your (in this case company's) side. To stay the very least way balanced, I would expect them to keep the rating/stars the user gave, while perhaps removing the detailed review that you were insisting had been inaccurate. After all the user indeed was a real former employee, thus that "rating" should still be counted no matter how "disgruntled".

Isn't Glassdoor and similar review sites are among other serve as safe outlets for mundane discontent?

Sure, most of readers in less emotional state of mind likely could properly discount those over-the-top devices of fiction...

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#312

Post by pbreit » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 1:51 AM UTC

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 doubt it’s anything mysterious. A once in a century pandemic is not a good representation of a broader time horizon.

The whole “pivot” sounds like uninformed heresay.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#313

Post by TimJRobinson » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 2:05 AM UTC

I've always pondered the idea of an open source review site hosted on GitHub. All reviews are added as pull requests (the site could have a form that creates a PR in the background) so every change to the site is audited.

This way the site can't just delete bad reviews or change ratings at will.

For sites like glassdoor ID verification could be done with a group of people in which 2-3 of them check the ID and approve the PR.

This model makes sense for any site which could be improved with a public log of why changes were made, a category most review sites fall into.

The site also gets free hosting so can be run as a community project with donations without needing a profit model.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#314

Post by im3w1l » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 2:11 AM UTC

berkes wrote: post #101

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.

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…

Physical. Otherwise tech companies might selectively show you reviews: Your friend Alice's (quite sincere) glowing review, but not your friend Bob's also sincere scathing one.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#315

Post by colinmhayes » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 2:21 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #299

colinmhayes wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dark web markets actually figured out a good way to solve reviews. 1. Only people who bought a product can review it. 2. the review includes how much was paid. 3. Heavily encourage everyone who buys the product to review it.

> Only people who bought a product can review it. Can't this still be gamed? Why can't a merchant just buy their own product and get the bulk of their money back, essentially buying fake reviews for the cost of the market's commission/payment processing fees.

The price is included. If the review is for a cheaper item you know it's probably fake. The fees are relatively high, so astroturfing $100+ items doesn't make sense when just a couple negative reviews tank you.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#316

Post by devrand » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 2:44 AM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #78

devrand wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of a different model though since Consumer Reports are often producing the reviews themselves (which may or may not include some survey data from users) and have first-hand experience to editorialize. With things like Yelp [1] and particularly with Glassdoor this is a difficult model to emulate. You generally expect users themselves to contribute quality reviews which you then publish directly (plus maybe…

Excellent point. A glassdoor competitor cannot use the Consumer Reports model since you can't review the working conditions of a company without being inside it. It shouldn't take much money to set up and run a review site so monetization should be a soluble problem. On a 6 figure budget you won't be as slick as competitors but if you're competing on trustworthiness... The biggest problem is going to be combating gam…

Ah, to clarify my donation-based suggestion was for users to donate, not companies. Regardless, yes, if the majority of the money comes from a minority of the userbase (whether it be users and/or companies), you're going to have a bad incentive. However, making it a non-profit removes the burden of increasing revenue YoY.

I think it's going to be very difficult to make it a viable business, particularly for the job market. It's a usually a fairly fixed size, and when it's growing it's usually not when people shell out for extra subscriptions. Could it work? Sure. But it's a business that while it might be profitable, it won't be growable. That'll make getting investments difficult, and the whole chicken and egg problem that much more difficult to overcome.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#317

Post by justin66 » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 2:45 AM UTC

fogetti wrote: post #292

BurningFrog wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extortion is a weird crime if you think about it. You ask people for money to not do something that's in itself legal. It's a topic ripe for tortured moral philosophy :)

People here for some reason think that throwing around legal terms based on gut feelings is somehow the start of civil discussion. And I tend to correct those people. That's all. Extortion is a legal term and it's pretty well defined compared to other crimes. And this is not extortion. I can recommend all commenters who downvoted to go and denounce the offence of extortion and see for themselves what happens. I for o…

> Extortion is a legal term

It also has a definition that 99% of the people you are communicating with, who are not lawyers, are more familiar with:

the practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats.

You're sperging out about the wrong thing to the wrong people.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#318

Post by celdon25 » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 2:51 AM UTC

ivanche wrote: post #202

fl0wenol wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it isn't. That's really scummy.

Well... Asking employees to leave reviews isn't scummy. On the oter hand, asking them to leave _only 5* reviews_ is scummy.

I don't know. If someone is still employed at that location, presumably a higher percentage can implicitly be expected to vote 5* compared to the average former employee. It's similar to the controversy over mailing ballots to specific neighborhoods based on demographics to try to swing the votes.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#319

Post by wyclif » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 2:56 AM UTC

nickbauman wrote: post #80

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.

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

Every single type of review site is plagued with coordinated shenanigans and gaming the system.

Antivaxxers brigading doctors on Yelp & Google. Diehard fandoms brigading Rotten Tomatoes. Sketchy Chinese sellers buying fake Amazon product reviews in FB groups.

Platforms know this by now, so consumers should too. The internet is basically a series of factions competing for amplification from algorithms at this point. Pump up your guy, downrank theirs. Coordinate for an algorithmic boost or trend where possible.

It's just marketing by way of manufactured consensus, not a review.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#320

Post by wyclif » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 2:59 AM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #115

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 don't think it needs to be physical but if I google a company and a big rant about them on reddit comes up coupled with a bunch of positive feedback on linkedin and glassdoor then I'm going to trust the reddit poster more. It might be someone grumping without fair grounds about unfair treatment but that's the only testimonial you can really trust these days.

To me the in-person-ness of the word of mouth doesn't matter, what's important is that word of mouth is coming from people you know in real life, not internet-only friends, gaming buddies, Twitter followers, etc. So that real friend could text you the word of mouth recommendation instead of telling you at work, over dinner, or at a party, but the reason it's more valuable is because ostensibly that real life friend wouldn't recommend something that was garbage to you since there is meatspace social capital involved.