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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 rev

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 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.

andrei_says_ 6y ago
If only they would be willing to leave the extra money they get for manipulating public opinion on the table, right? But it’s so easy! And so profitable! Joking aside, the reviewing-anything niche is getting very difficult in the age of sock puppet accounts. Any platform sooner or later becomes a space for dispute, manipulation and outright war between entities with competing agendas and no ethics. It’s a very difficult space to provide a good service - there are enough players ready to say anything and poison the well. We live in the era of everyone getting a dip in distorting reality :(
b0rsuk 6y ago
I suspect it was a bait&switch scheme all along.
hhs 6y ago
If interested, there was a long piece that talked about Glassdoor [0], and commenters also raised points about the validity of the information on that platform [1]. [0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/improving-workplace-culture-one-review-at-a-time https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/improving-work... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16232898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16232898
everdrive 6y ago
Online review systems are dead. Surely some must still be valid, but the well is poisoned, and nothing can be trusted.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Seems like most web based anything sees rapid steps back due to ease of gaming the system.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    I think the issue is the question of moderation - it's really trivial to throw up a discussion board on the web, but moderating that discussion board is where things get hairy since everyone wants to keep out the trolls but it can be hard to tell a legitimately fraudulent review from one a company claims is fraudulent - and there are extremely strong incentives to always believe the company since they've got the money. I think the heart of the issue is that something like glassdoor gets corrupted like this then a bunch of tech folks say "Forums, forums are easy and CHEAP!" go out and roll their own - maybe a few make it big and start having to police traffic once the trolls discover them... at that point they discover that the message board portion of their product is trivial and cheap but what actually costs is the moderation of that... then the costs begin to pile up and they make some deals with some of the better actors among companies to let them subsidize policiing their own reviews and it gets normalized and then the system collapses. Moderating things is hard.
    - agumonkey 6y ago
      I don't that's the issue (or I misread you then) It's the whole web thinking pattern. Make everything accessible, fast and free. Nobody makes money like this, and thus the system produced has no added value. It will devolve into whatever low hanging fruit can live on the inertia of branding and trends. Until someone makes an article like the one above, then someone else will try. If I want to rant, I'd say 10 years later someone will make a real system to grade things, and it will require serious work and serious money (think about banking grades) then the system will be kept in place (to an extent.. think about banking grades).
woah 6y ago
I can easily see a scenario where a lot of people are happy at a company and there are also people who are unhappy.
mistermann 6y ago
> but the fakeness of the industry as a whole It seems to me from reading the news that this charge can be increasingly levelled at larger portions of overall Western Civilization every day. It seems like a lot of wealthy and powerful people are simultaneously forgetting the simple lessons their parents taught them (I presume) when they were growing up. I can't think of very few famous people or organizations nowadays that I'd nominate as being trustworthy and of "high moral character", it seems like rationalizing away behavior that would previously have been considered highly unethical is like the hip new craze...and why not I guess, it yields tremendous benefits, and has no costs (to the individual or company doing it) that I can see.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  The real shame of a lot of these problems with reputation in the digital age is that there really are people making sacrifices to live up to their ethics and yet it's hard to make that known. Since our perspectives have become so broad, it's hard to pay careful attention to acts of virtue, which is often practiced by many small acts over the course of years.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    And also, the structure of our "democracy" is such that there is nothing that citizens can do about this, or most any other obvious major problem at this point. The aligned interests of corporations, the government, and the media seem to have put the citizens of the country into a kind of inescapable checkmate position.
    - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
      What we're seeing is the inevitable consequence of the granting and concentration of power. An idea I've seen proved true more times than I'd like to count is that "if you don't want power abused, don't create it in the first place." Any power granted WILL be misused and usually almost immediately and because the incentive is always to make it not LOOK like it's being abused, people get hilariously creative in how they do it, just making it look even more comic book evil. I've been around long enough to have a fairly strong sense now that the only way to win is to deny it battle - never concentrate power in the first place. But I think that genie has already escaped and isn't going back in the bottle without a huge amount of suffering and death.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
glouwbug 6y ago
But don't we do the same? When looking for a new job we remove contacts from references who might cause more harm than good. It's all about image
- ballenf 6y ago
  We don't claim our resumes are unbiased platforms of user (employer) generated content. So it's a terrible analogy.
- fogetti 6y ago
  It's not the same at all. A better analogy would be that you call around the influential business partners of your references that you are concerned about, and offering those business partners some money to completely disregard what those references reported about you.
bitobserver 6y ago
Had a similar experience somewhere. It seemed that any time a negative review was added on the company's Glassdoor, within weeks there would be new 4-5 star reviews. I watched that happen a few times.
bartread 6y ago
I wonder how new a phenomenon this really is. It's certainly been possible to get reviews taken down for many years. Some time ago I worked for a company where I did a stint as a technical recruiter before moving into an interim head of IT role to tide them over whilst we hired someone permanent. One of the people I'd been instrumental in hiring whilst I was technical recruiter went on to join the company during my tenure IT. It turned out that this person was not my - nor the company's - greatest ever hire. They were demanding, complaining, entitled and, above all, lazy. We bought this person a bunch of special equipment, including a ludicrously expensive keyboard supposed to help with RSI. Still, they continued to be obnoxious and lazy, literally doing nothing productive, until they were asked to leave during their probation period because they were basically insufferable. Said person then went on to post a slanderously inaccurate review on Glassdoor about the company, their manager, and the people they'd been working with in that team. At this time I wasn't particularly happy at the company, for various reasons, but even so, I could see the review was completely unfair and, substantially, a work of embittered fiction. I was pretty annoyed and felt somewhat responsible given that I'd been part of the team who'd brought them in to the company. So, with little hope of recourse, I contacted Glassdoor explaining the situation and detailing the inaccuracies in the review in a lot more depth - and a lot more specifically - than i've done here. Now, whilst what I said in my email was accurate, and I had little motivation to lie or paint the company in a particularly positive light, Glassdoor really had no way of verifying that what I'd told them was true. Moreover I wasn't in a role related to hiring. Nevertheless, within a couple of days the extremely negative review had been taken down, and I was grateful to them for taking it down. With that said, it sounds like what may have started out as a sane policy to handle complaints on a case by case basis has perhaps evolved into something rather less noble.
- zoomablemind 6y ago
  > ...within a couple of days the extremely negative review had been taken down, and I was grateful to them for taking it down. They literally just took your (in this case company's) side. To stay the very least way balanced, I would expect them to keep the rating/stars the user gave, while perhaps removing the detailed review that you were insisting had been inaccurate. After all the user indeed was a real former employee, thus that "rating" should still be counted no matter how "disgruntled". Isn't Glassdoor and similar review sites are among other serve as safe outlets for mundane discontent? Sure, most of readers in less emotional state of mind likely could properly discount those over-the-top devices of fiction...
cdolan 6y ago
I researched this a lot because I noticed companies I had intimate knowledge of had any sub-4 star review disappear. I detailed the practices in another comment further down; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793383
ekanes 6y ago
Glassdoor was acquired by Indeed, who is moving all paid job postings ($$$) over to Indeed. That leaves Glassdoor without a business model, hence this internal pivot. Source: https://www.chadcheese.com/episodes https://www.chadcheese.com/episodes (scroll down to see the Glassdoor/Indeed episodes)
darepublic 6y ago
It's because they use an antipattern for monetizing... Start with it free and then make it simultaneously crappier and not free. Improve quality and charge a humble amount for it. That's all this idea in this form is worth imo
phaedryx 6y ago
I had a similar situation. My negative review was removed about a month after I left it, which was after the period allowed to go back and edit it.
lhnz 6y ago
I wonder if a secondary system which showed the trend line of reviews and any spikes in ratings would be valuable?
- vanadium 6y ago
  Trends are already exposed on the Reviews page, behind a click.
sdenton4 6y ago
Yeah, it's kinda weird how large institutional actors have more power than a motley crew of disorganized workers. If only there were some other way.
sizzle 6y ago
Is there a way to scrape reviews and build an accurate database of all reviews over time that is verifiable by some blockchain type of encoding so you know if they were modified or deleted and can do a check against the current site. This would yield far more insight than taking their word on their proprietary algorithm flagging reviews. This would also be awesome to use against Yelp that I have first hand experience trying to be extorted by their sales teams affecting a family small business I host a website for and yelp page.
pbreit 6y ago
I doubt it’s anything mysterious. A once in a century pandemic is not a good representation of a broader time horizon. The whole “pivot” sounds like uninformed heresay.
m463 6y ago
This happened to a friend of mine with yelp. He had hired a lawyer who did a terrible awful incompetent job. He left an objective review on yelp which in a short time just disappeared. (Personally I was wondering if the lawyer contacted yelp or yelp contacted the lawyer)

andrei_says_ 6y ago

If only they would be willing to leave the extra money they get for manipulating public opinion on the table, right? But it’s so easy! And so profitable! Joking aside, the reviewing-anything niche is getting very difficult in the age of sock puppet accounts. Any platform sooner or later becomes a space for dispute, manipulation and outright war between entities with competing agendas and no ethics. It’s a very difficult space to provide a good service - there are enough players ready to say anything and poison the well. We live in the era of everyone getting a dip in distorting reality :(

b0rsuk 6y ago

I suspect it was a bait&switch scheme all along.

hhs 6y ago

If interested, there was a long piece that talked about Glassdoor [0], and commenters also raised points about the validity of the information on that platform [1]. [0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/improving-workplace-culture-one-review-at-a-time https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/improving-work... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16232898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16232898

everdrive 6y ago

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

agumonkey 6y ago
Seems like most web based anything sees rapid steps back due to ease of gaming the system.
- munk-a 6y ago
  I think the issue is the question of moderation - it's really trivial to throw up a discussion board on the web, but moderating that discussion board is where things get hairy since everyone wants to keep out the trolls but it can be hard to tell a legitimately fraudulent review from one a company claims is fraudulent - and there are extremely strong incentives to always believe the company since they've got the money. I think the heart of the issue is that something like glassdoor gets corrupted like this then a bunch of tech folks say "Forums, forums are easy and CHEAP!" go out and roll their own - maybe a few make it big and start having to police traffic once the trolls discover them... at that point they discover that the message board portion of their product is trivial and cheap but what actually costs is the moderation of that... then the costs begin to pile up and they make some deals with some of the better actors among companies to let them subsidize policiing their own reviews and it gets normalized and then the system collapses. Moderating things is hard.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    I don't that's the issue (or I misread you then) It's the whole web thinking pattern. Make everything accessible, fast and free. Nobody makes money like this, and thus the system produced has no added value. It will devolve into whatever low hanging fruit can live on the inertia of branding and trends. Until someone makes an article like the one above, then someone else will try. If I want to rant, I'd say 10 years later someone will make a real system to grade things, and it will require serious work and serious money (think about banking grades) then the system will be kept in place (to an extent.. think about banking grades).

woah 6y ago

I can easily see a scenario where a lot of people are happy at a company and there are also people who are unhappy.

mistermann 6y ago

> but the fakeness of the industry as a whole It seems to me from reading the news that this charge can be increasingly levelled at larger portions of overall Western Civilization every day. It seems like a lot of wealthy and powerful people are simultaneously forgetting the simple lessons their parents taught them (I presume) when they were growing up. I can't think of very few famous people or organizations nowadays that I'd nominate as being trustworthy and of "high moral character", it seems like rationalizing away behavior that would previously have been considered highly unethical is like the hip new craze...and why not I guess, it yields tremendous benefits, and has no costs (to the individual or company doing it) that I can see.

jrumbut 6y ago
The real shame of a lot of these problems with reputation in the digital age is that there really are people making sacrifices to live up to their ethics and yet it's hard to make that known. Since our perspectives have become so broad, it's hard to pay careful attention to acts of virtue, which is often practiced by many small acts over the course of years.
- mistermann 6y ago
  And also, the structure of our "democracy" is such that there is nothing that citizens can do about this, or most any other obvious major problem at this point. The aligned interests of corporations, the government, and the media seem to have put the citizens of the country into a kind of inescapable checkmate position.
  - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
    What we're seeing is the inevitable consequence of the granting and concentration of power. An idea I've seen proved true more times than I'd like to count is that "if you don't want power abused, don't create it in the first place." Any power granted WILL be misused and usually almost immediately and because the incentive is always to make it not LOOK like it's being abused, people get hilariously creative in how they do it, just making it look even more comic book evil. I've been around long enough to have a fairly strong sense now that the only way to win is to deny it battle - never concentrate power in the first place. But I think that genie has already escaped and isn't going back in the bottle without a huge amount of suffering and death.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

glouwbug 6y ago

But don't we do the same? When looking for a new job we remove contacts from references who might cause more harm than good. It's all about image

ballenf 6y ago
We don't claim our resumes are unbiased platforms of user (employer) generated content. So it's a terrible analogy.
fogetti 6y ago
It's not the same at all. A better analogy would be that you call around the influential business partners of your references that you are concerned about, and offering those business partners some money to completely disregard what those references reported about you.

bitobserver 6y ago

Had a similar experience somewhere. It seemed that any time a negative review was added on the company's Glassdoor, within weeks there would be new 4-5 star reviews. I watched that happen a few times.

bartread 6y ago

I wonder how new a phenomenon this really is. It's certainly been possible to get reviews taken down for many years. Some time ago I worked for a company where I did a stint as a technical recruiter before moving into an interim head of IT role to tide them over whilst we hired someone permanent. One of the people I'd been instrumental in hiring whilst I was technical recruiter went on to join the company during my tenure IT. It turned out that this person was not my - nor the company's - greatest ever hire. They were demanding, complaining, entitled and, above all, lazy. We bought this person a bunch of special equipment, including a ludicrously expensive keyboard supposed to help with RSI. Still, they continued to be obnoxious and lazy, literally doing nothing productive, until they were asked to leave during their probation period because they were basically insufferable. Said person then went on to post a slanderously inaccurate review on Glassdoor about the company, their manager, and the people they'd been working with in that team. At this time I wasn't particularly happy at the company, for various reasons, but even so, I could see the review was completely unfair and, substantially, a work of embittered fiction. I was pretty annoyed and felt somewhat responsible given that I'd been part of the team who'd brought them in to the company. So, with little hope of recourse, I contacted Glassdoor explaining the situation and detailing the inaccuracies in the review in a lot more depth - and a lot more specifically - than i've done here. Now, whilst what I said in my email was accurate, and I had little motivation to lie or paint the company in a particularly positive light, Glassdoor really had no way of verifying that what I'd told them was true. Moreover I wasn't in a role related to hiring. Nevertheless, within a couple of days the extremely negative review had been taken down, and I was grateful to them for taking it down. With that said, it sounds like what may have started out as a sane policy to handle complaints on a case by case basis has perhaps evolved into something rather less noble.

zoomablemind 6y ago
> ...within a couple of days the extremely negative review had been taken down, and I was grateful to them for taking it down. They literally just took your (in this case company's) side. To stay the very least way balanced, I would expect them to keep the rating/stars the user gave, while perhaps removing the detailed review that you were insisting had been inaccurate. After all the user indeed was a real former employee, thus that "rating" should still be counted no matter how "disgruntled". Isn't Glassdoor and similar review sites are among other serve as safe outlets for mundane discontent? Sure, most of readers in less emotional state of mind likely could properly discount those over-the-top devices of fiction...

cdolan 6y ago

I researched this a lot because I noticed companies I had intimate knowledge of had any sub-4 star review disappear. I detailed the practices in another comment further down; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793383

ekanes 6y ago

Glassdoor was acquired by Indeed, who is moving all paid job postings ($$$) over to Indeed. That leaves Glassdoor without a business model, hence this internal pivot. Source: https://www.chadcheese.com/episodes https://www.chadcheese.com/episodes (scroll down to see the Glassdoor/Indeed episodes)

darepublic 6y ago

It's because they use an antipattern for monetizing... Start with it free and then make it simultaneously crappier and not free. Improve quality and charge a humble amount for it. That's all this idea in this form is worth imo

phaedryx 6y ago

I had a similar situation. My negative review was removed about a month after I left it, which was after the period allowed to go back and edit it.

lhnz 6y ago

I wonder if a secondary system which showed the trend line of reviews and any spikes in ratings would be valuable?

vanadium 6y ago
Trends are already exposed on the Reviews page, behind a click.

sdenton4 6y ago

Yeah, it's kinda weird how large institutional actors have more power than a motley crew of disorganized workers. If only there were some other way.

sizzle 6y ago

Is there a way to scrape reviews and build an accurate database of all reviews over time that is verifiable by some blockchain type of encoding so you know if they were modified or deleted and can do a check against the current site. This would yield far more insight than taking their word on their proprietary algorithm flagging reviews. This would also be awesome to use against Yelp that I have first hand experience trying to be extorted by their sales teams affecting a family small business I host a website for and yelp page.

pbreit 6y ago

I doubt it’s anything mysterious. A once in a century pandemic is not a good representation of a broader time horizon. The whole “pivot” sounds like uninformed heresay.

m463 6y ago

This happened to a friend of mine with yelp. He had hired a lawyer who did a terrible awful incompetent job. He left an objective review on yelp which in a short time just disappeared. (Personally I was wondering if the lawyer contacted yelp or yelp contacted the lawyer)