The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews • Hacker News Board

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#21

Post by jtriangle » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 5:44 PM UTC

UglyToad wrote: post #8

dmonitor wrote: post #2

Article focuses on fake positive reviews, but I wouldn't be surprised if leaving fake negative reviews on a competitor was also a thing

The real 4D chess move is fake negative reviews of your own company that are so unreasonable in content they cast doubt on other negative reviews. This seems like an unsolvable problem with online reviews in general. However I generally find Google Maps reviews for restaurants fairly reliable. You'd think with the amount of data they slurp up they could cut out fake reviews based on location data alone. Maybe it's ju…

Fairly solvable with an actual identity/employment verification system, and that's not exactly an exotic idea.

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#22

Post by nerdjon » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 5:45 PM UTC

To me the entire idea of Glassdoor is fundamentally flawed so there is a part of me that can't exactly blame for things like this going on.

It has been shown time and time again that most people won't go out of their way to leave a positive review for something and will only make the effort when they want to complain.

Mix this with something like a job where generally the only reason people will leave is likely due to something negative going on (while I don't have numbers to back this up, I would not think that most are leaving because they are simply not learning anything new and feel like they are done where they currently are. But maybe I am wrong about this assumption?).

So the people leaving would only have negative views that strongly skew the actual appearance of how a job may be.

I have left 3 Glassdoor reviews (once for an interview that was so bad I walked out) and all of them negative. But for 2 of them if I look back honestly I realize that much of what I was leaving for was not an issue for the entire company and was more specific to my team.

That doesn't mean that those negative reviews are not valuable, they are. But I don't think they really paint a good picture, I know I don't trust it if I am looking at a company knowing both what I mentioned and what is mentioned in this article.

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#23

Post by rightbyte » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 5:45 PM UTC

AlanSE wrote: post #14

jchw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I noticed the exact same thing. Glassdoor is a complete scam, and it has been for as long as I've had a career. I do not even check anymore.

So is it basically true that there is no objective information out there anymore, because anyone running a successful site gets corrupted with money?

Blind seems somewhat OK?

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#24

Post by guiriduro » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 5:45 PM UTC

Isn't it fairly widely known that the overall Glassdoor rating isn't worth looking at, and that short and wildly positive (or short and negative) individual reviews aren't useful either, because of the widespread fake review problem. Usually the ones clearly written by humans with real knowledge of the company are a little longer and contain particular story snippet that will add to the credibility. In my experience those skew toward the negative however, as I would mentally discard short positive reviews more frequently even if genuine, being so hard to distinguish from paid or incentivised corporate hr-wash.

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#25

Post by iambateman » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 5:46 PM UTC

AlanSE wrote: post #14

jchw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I noticed the exact same thing. Glassdoor is a complete scam, and it has been for as long as I've had a career. I do not even check anymore.

So is it basically true that there is no objective information out there anymore, because anyone running a successful site gets corrupted with money?

I’d say Consumer Reports and NYT wire cutter are pretty objective…

Their bigger issue is that company quality doesn’t change much from year to year, so the pans that were good in 2019 are probably still good now, which is boring.

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#26

Post by ProllyInfamous » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 5:47 PM UTC

paradox460 wrote: post #7

I once worked at a company that started getting a slew of bad Glassdoor reviews. The reviews were real; the company leadership had been making some bad choices and the reviews reflected it. So they sent out messages in the company chatroom, asking people to leave positive reviews.

Same situation except mine offered a day of pay upon spinning positivity.

After this personal whoring, I was sure to leave a complementary negative review from a shill account.

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#27

Post by michaelteter » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

I believe that Glassdoor exists almost purely because salary information is not public. While company reputation and reviews are of interest, the salary information is likely much more a driver of traffic.

And based on my attempted use of the site, Glassdoor is unreliable and (intentionally) misleading.

Even at the most basic level, their UI flatly lies about what data they possess. If you search a company, in the salary column it will show a number which is designed to suggest a number of salary data elements available. Honestly I cannot say what that number actually means as it seems to have no value at all. Specifically, it will say 5 or 8 or some other small but non-zero number... and yet there are zero visible salary records for the company (even if you are a contributor of information and thus deemed to be allowed to view other information on the site).

I expect Glassdoor is like the many dating sites on the internet - full of fluff and false/artificial information so the site appears to be valuable and worth visits.

If we ever reach a point where company position salaries are public on a broad scale, Glassdoor will fade into obscurity.

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#28

Post by IlPeach » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

nickpeterson wrote: post #4

I remember working at a company that got frequently mentioned as “one of the best places to work in CITY”, and a few months into my tenure one of the HR employees circulated the website to go vote for our company on the “best places to work in CITY” website. I think Glassdoor is basically grievances by employees, some of whom are unreasonable, and fake counter-reviews by HR/marketing. I generally just look at the com…

Same here. It does sound like Amazon reviews tbh.

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#29

Post by newah1 » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 6:00 PM UTC

Despite high turnover, and lots of complaints, my last company had one of the highest Glassdoor ratings I'd ever seen> How? Simple, they'd pay their employees to do so.

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#30

Post by pyeri » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

shippintoboston wrote: post #3

I used to work at Desktop Metal which was (at the time) a pretty small startup here in Boston. When I left, I wrote a pretty negative review on Glassdoor about what I felt was a toxic work environment. At the time I submitted my review, there were probably about 10 reviews for the company. The very next day after my review was posted, about 7 positive reviews popped up. Obviously pretty suspicious behavior, but when…

A blockchain based solution can be developed for customer reviews. If your cryptographically signed and verifiable review went and sat on the disk of every computer on the planet, there will be no options to manipulate it.