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A warning about Glassdoor

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Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#331

Post by eska »

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…

My previous employer would just sent requests to delete negative reviews on Google Maps because the reviewer didn't use their real name, and poof, it was gone. Easy as pie.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#332

Post by m463 »

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…

This happened to a friend of mine with yelp.

He had hired a lawyer who did a terrible awful incompetent job.

He left an objective review on yelp which in a short time just disappeared.

(Personally I was wondering if the lawyer contacted yelp or yelp contacted the lawyer)

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#333

Post by humanrebar »

sellyme wrote: post #305
anonymousiam wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but property owners pay property tax, which is a big part of where city revenue comes from. Allowing renters to vote on how the money is spent creates the same issue described in the grandparent post.

Money is fungible. Renters have skin in the game, because they paid tax (and because they live in the general society that those tax dollars are being used on). That they paid no property tax is not relevant, because it ceases to become "property tax" as soon as it's paid, and just enters a larger general pool. People may have differing levels of skin in the game, but it's no more sensible to say that property tax sh…

It's relevant for the same reason that it's relevant who pays a hospital bill. The person actually making the payment will be sensitive in ways that a pure beneficiary will not be.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#334

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

> Word of mouth is all you can trust.

Yes, and only if the words come from the mouths of trusted friends. Everything else is probably tainted by monetary incentives and should be taken with several grains of salt.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#335

Post by whimsicalism »

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.

As another user noted, you can encode the message into the chain though.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#336

Post by bartread »

zoomablemind wrote: post #311
bartread wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 emp…

> They literally just took your (in this case company's) side.

Yes, this the point I was making. This has always been the case: it's just that now it's become much more pathological and widespread on the platform. Partly it sounds like that's due to changes in policy/strategy on the part of Glassdoor, but I think it's also because companies have realised that you can just ask Glassdoor to remove reviews and they will.

Do I feel bad about that specific review being taken down? Not at all, because it was absolutely slanderous to others this person had worked with. But the fact that it happened without any further process does point to an underlying problem.

It's a long time since I've used the site but I believe companies might have the right to post public responses to reviews. Beyond this maybe some sort of dispute resolution process would be the way to go.

Still, I can't really figure out how to make it work: if it's cheap and easy for reviewers to post reviews, and cheap and easy for companies to get them taken down or otherwise manipulate them, you're always going to end up with a review service that's essentially worthless and can't be trusted.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#337

Post by berkes »

nickbauman wrote: post #302
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…

When I wrote "word of mouth" I meant a mouth that I can see move from someone I know. I should have made that clear, sorry.

No problem, and no need to excuse yourself! I was merely curious and started thinking about the implications.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#338

Post by b0rsuk »

elwell wrote: post #124
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?

That would be best, but in an effort to save space they don't make frequent snapshots.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#339

Post by jazzdev »

lhorie wrote: post #140
wslh wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Makes me want to build an ML system to rate ratings. Of course that could escalate into an arms race.

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

#340

Post by jazzdev »

ProAm wrote: post #156
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.

> 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.

It seems like this is a space where a non-profit might be more successful. Any profit-based company is going to have incentives to game reviews. Consumer Reports is published by a non-profit. They have a decent reputation. Reputation exists on the internet. HN has a good reputation too.
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