Aren't Glassdoor's reviews pretty much a scam anyway? Last I heard companies can pay $$ to gain moderation control over their own profile to delete/downrank bad reviews.
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I know of two multinational conglomerates (one Indian, the other Argentinian) that requires all newcomers to post a GlassDoor review and a LinkedIn post praising the company, the onboarding gifts, and such things. Both are absolute hell to work for unless you're upper management, according to acquaintances that have been there and climbed outside the bog of low-level positions.
It's not a lot, but it's weird it happened twice.
I’ve never flexed my new positions or anything like that, which seems to be widespread nowadays to seek validation on social media.
I’ll never make a post about a company even if I end up loving my time there, it’s just not going to happen. It looks fake and everyone knows that.
> It looks fake and everyone knows that.
Sometimes I wonder if being fake is seen as pejorative as it used to be. I mean the whole "social media influencer" thing is super fake, but people seem to eat that shit up and a depressing number of kids aspire to be one.
You're missing that plenty of people lack the intelligence, education, media literacy etc to actually recognize that "fake"ness. You can still pull in a hundred grand scamming people on instagram by posting a selfie with a rented or parked Lambo and a caption reading "Send me <shitty cryptotoken of the day> and I'll double it and show you how to be rich just like me!!!"
There are people on this very forum who are 100% subscribed to the "if you work hard you will make it" propaganda and also the often unspoken corollary of "if you didn't make it, it's your own fault". Arguably that's the entire ethos of this VC/startup focused community.
We are extremely irrational creatures, who have pretty much only advanced by being able to write down information and curate that body of work over the centuries, enough to tease out a couple semi-working systems that produce better than a coin flip results enough of the time to manage to advance. Even the best educated, smartest, or most successful of us are absolutely chock full of irrationality and bias opposed to direct evidence. Even Einstein abandoned the data when it disagreed with his beliefs.
There's also some preliminary data that younger people consider the awkward, scammy, low production value feel of things like tiktoks to be "more authentic" and therefore more trustworthy to them. All you have to do is say ten words very confidently and some insular community will adopt it as part of their belief system. Look at all the absolute dreck, nonsense pseudoscience that makes up the incel community.
Media literacy is completely irrelevant to all the people who lack it. When you haven't learned HOW to pick apart and interrogate a source of information, you have no option but to fall back to shittier, brand or ideology based source analysis.
Who needs glassdoor when you get red flags like that on your first day.
Globant?
Their interview raised a lot of red flags for me. I see they were raised for a reason.
That's one, the other starts with a 'T' and ends with 'CS'.
> Last I heard companies can pay $$ to gain moderation control over their own profile to delete/downrank bad reviews.
I very briefly worked at a toxic company that was aggressive about Glassdoor reviews. From what I heard, they couldn’t get them removed just by asking. They had to carefully examine the Glassdoor rules and find a reason that a review violated the rules.
They used the argument that reviews revealed confidential company information most of the time. It didn’t always work.
When I left, I used a throwaway email and coffee shop WiFi to leave a completely accurate, honest review. I carefully made sure to comply with every letter of Glassdoor’s rules.
My review is still up.
There’s something odd in the lifecycle of these sorts of sites. I wonder if it goes like this:
Review site starts out as community driven, connected people tend to get involved. This provides a filter for competent users.
Companies become aware of the site, start looking for ways to manipulate their score. Companies gain access to competent employee. It is bearable for a while.
The scores are manipulated to the point where the site no longer provides a good signal. Only out of the loop dummies still use it, and it becomes a negative filter.
From this point of view, community sites are more like a crop that gets harvested. It would be better for people if it didn’t happen, but the incentive for the company seems to be: be the first one to start consuming the site.
Oh, a mini-cycle could be: at first, the companies that start manipulating the reviews tend to be the more connected and on-the-ball ones, so users don’t mind as much, since the companies that are trying to exploit the rankings them are also filtered for competence.
How is this not fraud?
https://help.glassdoor.com/s/article/I-m-an-employer-What-ca...
> You can't pay us to take down reviews and we apply the same content moderation rules to our clients that we use for everyone else.
I wonder if it could be considered securities fraud, in the Matt Levine sense of "Everything is Securities Fraud."
I certainly would take CEO approval rating and employee's reviews of overall job satisfaction into account when investing in a company. If you see very low reviews, you know the company is under-investing in employees and will likely need to increase spend on employee retention in the coming years, which is not reported in their current financial reports. Likewise, if you want to be cynical, a consistent 5 star company has some fat it could trim, which would increase it's investment value.
Perhaps we'll see a shareholder lawsuit following a mass employee resignation event which was arguably concealed by manipulating employee reviews.
A few of the tricks I've noticed they use:
* Review not tagged as English, or neither Full-Time or Part-Time, and those are the default filters
* Default sort is "Most Recent" and the Featured Review at the top of reviews is always a positive hand chosen review
* "Found 515 out of over 530 reviews" - I suspect they maybe take those 15 other reviews into account for the rating average, but you just can't read them right now so technically not taken down
* Negative review stays in Pending state while being screened by Glassdoor for over a month, but the time it's approved, it's buried by newer reviews
*
> https://help.glassdoor.com/s/article/I-m-an-employer-What-ca...
Interesting that of the 4 options to address bad employee reviews, none of those options is:
* Address the review by improving your company culture or policies
oh but they're not paying to take down reviews
you're paying to "flag and report reviews for additional scrutiny"
their process then co-incidentally always seems to agree that those reported by paying customers are bogus
(same as paying for trustpilot)
I’m still filing the regulator complaint.
I find it hilarious that all the money pumped into Glassdoor has created less useful information about companies than the Better Business Bureau.
Many companies pay agencies to post fake positive reviews about them. This is especially common among companies who publish fake job vacancies.
Many companies just post fake positive reviews about themselves directly. Glassdoor reviews come from two places: aggrieved former employees and HR departments. The whole thing is garbage.
i wish everyone would adopt a mutation to the 5 star review, so that at a single glance a 3 star review would have coded with it whether it's a bathtub curve, or equal, distribution. like, if it's bathtub curve, change the middle star to a skull. but if it's even, leave it a star. how great would that be
I feel like this is technically some kind of FTC violation, even if it’s not broadly enforced.
> Last I heard companies can pay $$ to gain moderation control over their own profile to delete/downrank bad reviews.
I can verify this was true at least a few years ago. My friend's company had some bad (but totally honest) reviews. They requested them to be removed. Denied. A few days later they received an email from Glassdoor, talking about some sort of premium plan. They signed up. The bad reviews disappeared a few days later.
> Aren't Glassdoor's reviews pretty much a scam anyway?
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but all online aggregate reviews are a scam. There are countless ways to game them and with AI it's only going to get worse. At best, they're a weak signal of whether something is bad or good. And the bigger and more popular a review site, the worse the quality/reliability since the impact of manipulating reviews on a site with a huge audience is that much higher.
I know for sure that Glassdoor has no problem with companies flooding their page with fake positive reviews. I worked for a shady company that did exactly that in the most blatant way possible. They consistenly posted short vapid 5 star reviews on a regular weekly schedule from the same IP. I tried reporting it to Glassdoor two different times and they could not have cared less.
All reviews are scammed. Phone a friend.
I have an idea. We could build a new, better review site. Sprinkle in some blockchain and AI...
Join the trust graph...
My understanding is that these sorts of sites allow companies to pay to boost positive reviews to de-emphasise negative reviews, not remove bad reviews.
Still somewhat shady.
Remember when Yelp did that? And yet, somehow not dead.
Yelp isn't dead but no one I know uses it anymore, specifically due to all the issues with reviews.
Yelp rating, photos and reviews come before the street address when you click on a place in Apple Maps. I have to scroll down to get the street address, somebody decided that is less important.
I think Yelp only survives through its integration with Apple Maps. If Apple ever decides to build its own review feature I can’t imagine Yelp surviving.
Apple seems to be working on it. A lot of times when I press that POI icon, I get Trip Advisor reviews and not Yelp. Additionally, there is thumbs up/down UI in the Apple Maps app to rate a POI. An example would be Fairhaven Village Inn, Bellingham, WA: no Yelp droppings anywhere to be found.
Given the integration, I'd expect that Apple's decision to build their own would start with buying Yelp if for nothing more than the data Yelp already has.
> And yet, somehow not dead.
I can't remember the last time I looked at yelp, pre-covid maybe?
Yelp has no real alternative for vetting unfamiliar restaurants, at least not one which doesn’t have similar conflicts.
TripAdvisor? They charge for advertising/sponsored positioning, but it's free to claim your business and it allows you to respond to people but pretty sure not do 'moderation' like that.
Google Maps?
I find this is generally region-specific, as what review sites are most commonly used will differ somewhat from region to region.
I have found it preferable to visit the restaurant in question, look around, read the menu, and decide based on those cues around me whether it's worth risking a meal there.
Yelp has become useless, and TripAdvisor is as bad if not worse. The reviews on Google Maps are wholly unreliable as well.
If you're in UK look at Harden's http://www.hardens.com/
I basically stopped reading Amazon and Yelp reviews. They do more harm then good. Now it's all about human-curated information. Find someone you trust - on social media, a new site, or a newsletter. Get the info from them.
Should I eat here? Should I buy this product? Etc.
With restaurants it's tricky - sometimes you just need to take a chance. There is some old-school magic in that.
> With restaurants it's tricky - sometimes you just need to take a chance. There is some old-school magic in that.
Absolutely agree, and I try to do this more often now. A visit somewhere new and untested for lunch or dinner isn't like a product purchase, where I might regret a bad purchase for months or years. If a restaurant doesn't work out, I've only lost an hour or two of my time, and a bit of cash that likely still went to providing me sustenance, even if the experience and taste was poor.
And if it turns out to be great -- well... great!
>Find someone you trust - on social media, a new site, or a newsletter. Get the info from them.
OMG please don't do this - it's more gamed/scammy than online reviews: people will routinely post sponsored content disguised as personal recommendations. The FTC occasionally cracks down on it (or sends warning labels) but it's still so ubiquitous.
> I basically stopped reading Amazon and Yelp reviews
I've done that too and am sure many people here on HN realized how gameable and gamed they are but sadly it still works for the masses who fall into these traps like flies to a candle. When these this kind of deception will stop working we will have reached a total trust of 0.
it wasn’t always the case (or at least most people believed it wasn’t) and they exist for a long time – the suggestion I think is for the people like me, who wrote something there over 10 years ago and now their posts would possibly stop being anonymous.