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The two big mobile app stores have been flooded with spam reviews for over 5 years now unchecked. For those that know how to spot fake reviews, it's easy to tell which apps are not legit. For most consumers though, they just believe what they see.
So they’re sacrificing why they exist and the reason they have anyone visit their website. To become a PR company that is based on the memory of a community/purpose.
Classic bait-and-switch. This essentially happens with every review site after they build up enough brand awareness to pull it off. I guess it happens because from the perspective of the company it makes total sense to try. Why earn pennies on the dollar from e.g. ad clicks when you can get huge lumpy (and possibly regular) payouts for much less work in much less time
When things are working well, the answer is because honesty is a better policy in the long run. Impartiality, and a reputation for impartiality, is why Which? still exists, at the age of 63. [0][1]
It's the exact same play as Yelp - once they grew out of the community review forum stage, they turn to extortion to make it profitable.
Then, mysteriously, within the space of a week, almost all of the negative reviews vanished from Glassdoor, and a lot of bland 4 star "well there's good and bad, some mistakes were made, but despite the past few months, overall it's good" appeared, pushing the handful of negative reviews that remained off the front page. I know from former colleagues that management had "suggested" staff write these sorts of reviews.
Now the company rating is higher than it was before the layoffs and I am completely disillusioned with not only that company, and Glassdoor, but the fakeness of the industry as a whole. It's so disappointing that a site that originally felt like a useful resource for workers has become just yet another PR/branding tool.
Glassdoor is extortion-as-a-service. They routinely called up two previous places I worked and offered to remove bad reviews if we paid them, which we declined. One of the bad reviews eventually became prominently featured. To be honest it wouldn't surprise me if they wrote the review themselves, that's how scummy I feel this company is. Totally garbage business model, and if anyone reading this works there I hope yo…
Putin's goons on Facebook, bots on Twitter, Yelp's "algorithm" being used to extort merchants, personal brand management on LinkedIn, black-hat hackers on HN and Reddit, ... why should Glassdoor be different?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Classic bait-and-switch. This essentially happens with every review site after they build up enough brand awareness to pull it off. I guess it happens because from the perspective of the company it makes total sense to try. Why earn pennies on the dollar from e.g. ad clicks when you can get huge lumpy (and possibly regular) payouts for much less work in much less time
> Why earn pennies on the dollar from e.g. ad clicks when you can get huge lumpy (and possibly regular) payouts for much less work in much less time When things are working well, the answer is because honesty is a better policy in the long run . Impartiality, and a reputation for impartiality, is why Which? still exists, at the age of 63. [0][1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which%3F [1] https://www.which.co.uk/a…
Yes, every tech nerd is mocking their PC tests, because they are just like a vaccuum cleaner test: unbox, set-up, do mainstream stuff, like writing mails and Word documents. No discussion of GDDR5 vs. GDDR4 or such nonsense.
It's a fantastic resource when you don't know what to look for (until today you never had any use for the tool you now consider buying) and it's not tech (then I tend to look to Wirecutter, for all its faults and controversies).
It's the exact same play as Yelp - once they grew out of the community review forum stage, they turn to extortion to make it profitable.
Is this true? I thought Yelp still did a decent job of moderating reviews.
They moderate reviews that are inconvenient to the business that accept their extortion. Their business model is to sell protection to businesses, like an extortion racket.
This is why organizations like this are not a replacement for government enforced labor and consumer rights. Once an organization establishes a strong brand as a consumer review aggregator, the temptation to accept money for better ratings is extremely strong. When talking about a for-profit review aggregator, you might even say that accepting money for ratings is part of their responsibility to the shareholders because it can be so much more lucrative than serving accurate ratings to individuals.