A warning about Glassdoor

Post by Cyberspy » Sat, Oct 17, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

everdrive wrote: post #51

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…

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

TrustPilot has gone the same way.

If you look in the clickbait at the bottom of lots of articles, you'll see one advertising a trick that every Android user should know. It takes you to a website at SecuritySaversOnline.com which has an Advertorial for TotalAV anti-virus, that implies it is free, which it isn't. I posted a negative review of this site and then called TotalAV to inform them of this site that was perhaps a fake affiliates site, but during the chat, they said it was their site - TotalAV were using a site with fake offers to advertise them. So, I posted a negative review of them too on TrustPilot - it's one of the 1* reviews here: https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/totalav.com?languages=en&st... (search for cyberspy)

TotalAV disputed my claims, but I demonstrated to TrustPilot that it was a genuine review, even though I wasn't a customer and the review remains.

Why is TrustPilot broken?

TotalAV have over 31K reviews, 87% 5, average 4.8 - but most of them one liners from people who have no review history. Compare with other AV providers - Sophos have 11 reviews, average 2.1, AVG have 2534, average 1.9, McAfee 358 average 1.4, Norton 347, average 1.5 Basically, people don't review their AV unless thay have a bad experience - or the supplier asks them to. I pointed out to TrustPilot that TotalAV's review profile looked fake but, while they let my review stay they have done nothing to rectify the entirely disproportionate review profile of TotalAV

Post by yencabulator » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 3:20 PM UTC

jazzdev wrote: post #340

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.

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.

Consumer Reports these days looks like nothing but a marketing catalog with unclear monetization plan. We regularly get some sort of a "teaser flyer" addressed to a previous resident, and it's filled with clickbait titles and short scandalous blurbs telling the reader to pay for the full article. It looks like a cross between a tabloid and a product catalog. They might still do some valuable testing, but they've definitely been taken over by marketing MBAs, and are "optimizing their content".

Re: A warning about Glassdoor

Re: A warning about Glassdoor