Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

careerfair.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 160 posts

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#41

Post by Mtinie »

princevegeta89 wrote: post #17
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…

No one trusts these review companies actually. They simply exist to extort entities that get reviewed either to remove negative reviews or promote or even auto-post fake positive reviews. Yelp is a classic example that did this for years.

Can you foresee a scenario where a review site could legitimately exist without turning to synthetic reviews, dark UI patterns, or outright brand extortion?

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#42

Post by princevegeta89 »

Mtinie wrote: post #41
princevegeta89 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one trusts these review companies actually. They simply exist to extort entities that get reviewed either to remove negative reviews or promote or even auto-post fake positive reviews. Yelp is a classic example that did this for years.

Can you foresee a scenario where a review site could legitimately exist without turning to synthetic reviews, dark UI patterns, or outright brand extortion?

Only if it was driven by a non-profit org I guess

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#43

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

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…

I've experienced this almost verbatim - put up a factual (at least from my view) account of working with a previous employer, a "warts and all" review. Next week I see about ten 5-star reviews each with a single sentence something like "This is a great place to work!".

However, when searching out the low-down on a potential new employer, I only read the one and two star reviews - if they're pretty spurious then I feel more comfortable taking a role there. If however the poor reviews contain lots of pretty specific complaints, I find them more believable that the single sentence "everything is awesome here" style reviews.

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#44

Post by avereveard »

jdwithit wrote: post #20

He mentions ChatGPT in passing but you could write a whole separate article about that. These bogus review companies are going to be able to pump out so many more reviews, of higher quality, with access to LLM-generated content. This problem is only going to get even worse.

They could already do that with pockets deep enough, what openai allows is for the common people to fight back

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#46

Post by idiotsecant »

whatwhatnewacct wrote: post #35

Glassdoor is a hellscape for employees and employers. Current and former employees can write literally anything they want, true or false, and it gets published. Employers have no cause for recourse except apparently paying people to write fake reviews. So a brand can be damaged by fake reviews or lies in reviews, and have to go through backchannels to fix it. It's basically a place for legal libel and puts everyone i…

This is surprisingly pro-corporate take. This same argument could be made for literally anywhere that people provide feedback on anything. In such cases I tend to favor the interests of the least powerful rather than the interests of the most powerful.

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#47

Post by kfarr »

princevegeta89 wrote: post #42
Mtinie wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you foresee a scenario where a review site could legitimately exist without turning to synthetic reviews, dark UI patterns, or outright brand extortion?

Only if it was driven by a non-profit org I guess

Consumer Reports has entered the chat

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#48

Post by paddw »

Glassdoor's model suffers from intrinsic problems such that... it's hard to imagine a site as it could ever work well for a sustained period of time before becoming a target for abuse.

It also seems inevitable that such sites, will exist. Can you really blame Glassdoor here? Are they supposed to do a thorough investigation for every review? At least it gives some sort of weak signal about the place.

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#49

Post by Der_Einzige »

sahila wrote: post #32
michaelteter wrote: post #27

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 sa…

https://www.levels.fyi/ is a grest site for actual salary information on tech related jobs. The data reported very much matched my last round of interviews and the data granularity is good, being able to see levels, location, pay breakdowns, and even dates when the salary was posted.

Why are people downvoting this? Glassdoor numbers are BS and levels.fyi is extremely accurate.

Re: The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews

#50

Post by pushswap »

I left a review on the BBB, when I was a student, after being promised a gift card for a video interview of a product for one of the large tech companie's PMs.

I refused a free trial or some other token offer by a call center employee that the company sent as part of the BBB resolution process.

Not long after,the BBB removed my review even though I offered email evidence between the PM and I. I emailed one of their managers asking for an explanation for why they removed it. They gave me some vague boilerplate that didn't address the issue.

Because they weren't clear in their communication with me on the reasons why, I couldn't help but wonder whether they had some similar incentive in their relationships with certain companies to remove problematic reviews.

Post reply on HN