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Every organization that accepts reviews from "users" about goods/services/employment provided by organizations eventually seems to run into a conflict of intere

Every organization that accepts reviews from "users" about goods/services/employment provided by organizations eventually seems to run into a conflict of interest between their stated purpose and their finances. This is true of Yelp, BBB, and now, I guess, Glassdoor. 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.

zerop 6y ago
Do you think Quora also does it or might do in future? I would trust Quora more looking at the founding team.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  I would guess that Quora's algorithm could be gamed pretty easily by having an employee leave a positively-biased answer to a question and then having a bunch of other employees upvote the answer. The company could even have an employee seed the question, then have other employees answer and upvote in order to bury other questions that have negative responses. Basically, Quora appears to tolerate quite a bit of spam, which would make it hard for them to be an authoritative source on anything other than "how do I game Quora's algorithm?" (since obviously whoever's answer is highest-rated has won ipso facto).
  - WilTimSon 6y ago
    I used to frequent Quora and stopped specifically due to this. Leave a few answers on popular topics, especially about apps, and your inbox is flooded with requests to answer questions like "Is it true that X company is the most amazing and affordable software development outsourcing service?" and "Why is Some_Random_App much better than Popular_App_That_Our_App_Copies?". Sometimes they were brazen enough to post questions about X app with names like XMary or XJohn.
- csomar 6y ago
  Quora has already gone downhill. They are just a few steps from Yahoo answers. The answers just happen to be more polished and checked for grammatical mistakes.
skybrian 6y ago
Government regulation has its own obvious failure modes (various kinds of corruption, industry capture, or underfunding), so you can't say one is always better than the other. It all depends. There is no guaranteed solution. Hopefully some better Glassdoor competitor will come along.
- curtis3389 6y ago
  There's middle-ground between for-profit corporations and government. There are social purpose corporations, benefit corporations, non-profits, cooperatives, etc.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    The reason that Consumer Reports is considered the gold standard for reviews is because it is a non-profit that does not accept money from anyone but its subscribers. Too bad people are so used to getting things for "free" on the web these days, or it could do a much better job.
    - wincy 6y ago
      I finally started subscribing to consumer reports. Every time something breaks now in my house I replace it with the top rated product from Consumer Reports. So far it’s going great.
    - everybodyknows 6y ago
      Exactly. There's one other business model that might let the organization stay honest: Accept advertising, but only from unconflicted sources, such as online schools or resume polishers. But this feels like a shoestring business.
  - skybrian 6y ago
    Yes, they should be considered too, but they have their own failure modes. I guess what I’m saying is that an organization’s form of government isn’t a reliable indicator of its trustworthiness and you have to consider other signals as well.
polote 6y ago
It is not only reviews companies it is any company in which revenue is not aligned with the company's product objective, you find the same things with dating apps for example. One way to solve that, is to stop offering free service and make users pay to access the service. If you have Glassdoor but it is not the companies who pay but the users then the issue is solved
nerdponx 6y ago
How does Angie's List perform in this regard? The user (i.e. review writer/reader) pays, not the business being reviewed. In theory, that forces the incentives to align correctly.
- jdofaz 6y ago
  It's freemium now
  - Zigurd 6y ago
    Freemium is OK as long as you have to pay to review and perform any other action that would affect the rating of a review, etc.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  No, they take money from service providers: https://www.angieslist.com/faq/how-does-angies-list-make-money/ https://www.angieslist.com/faq/how-does-angies-list-make-mon...
Zigurd 6y ago
This is one reason why nearly all social media (if you take reviews to be a form of that) sites should know their customers' identities and be able to use that information to screen for astroturfing. Even a small payment and requiring a method of payment would reduce astroturfing, and put review sites on a revenue model that would reduce the temptation to become extortion-as-a-service.
- uniqueid 6y ago
  Ideally, one entity should know the user's identity, and the user can choose what information that entity can make public. Most sites don't need to know a user's legal name, though they may need to know that the user doesn't have a duplicate account and, perhaps, some detail, such as, in the case of Glassdoor, their emloyer.
  - function_seven 6y ago
    Unfortunately that still chills legitimate negative reviews. If I know my real identity is tied, somehow, to the gripes I posted about my employer, there's a risk of subpoenas unmasking me when that employer decides I've libeled them. I don't know how to solve this dilemma. Or if it can be solved. Sometimes anonymity is required to get the unvarnished truth, but it also clearly enables sock puppets and astroturfing.
    - uniqueid 6y ago
      Unfortunately that still chills legitimate negative reviews. That is true, but it is a question of degree. If my legal name is attached to a review, I, personally, will not post ever. If I know the only way someone can find my legal name is to subpoena some midwestern chain of brick&mortar notaries, I will post sometimes. Like you, I don't think there is a perfect solution: as a sender, one wants privacy, but as a receiver, one wants transparency. We need some sort of compromise that one can accept for either role.
ViViDboarder 6y ago
Except that if you accept money for better ratings the quality of your suggestions goes down and people stop using your service. This is why many such review sites explicitly do not allow you to pay to alter reviews. Their entire revenue engine would crumble. Some will allow you to solicit reviews (Glassdoor), while others even prohibit that (Yelp, Apple App Store) due to it generally being some way of influencing scores.
- polote 6y ago
  > people stop using your service. Well the only competitor they have is Indeed, and Indeed belongs to the Recruit Holdings Group, like Glassdoor ;)
- jellicle 6y ago
  Except that the part where your company makes extra money and you get a fat bonus happens now, while the part where consumers eventually lose faith in your ratings takes years. And you can spend 10% of the extra revenue on a bunch of ads talking about how honest and trustworthy your company is, making it take even longer.
fakedang 6y ago
Ahh, I remember the good old days of Zomato extorting our restaurant. Zomato's rep offered to give us a 5 star rating if we gave him free takeaway food, or a 3 star rating otherwise, during the initial listing. We obviously gave him the free food, but I thought I would be a wise-ass and decided to record him. Posted it online, but turns out, Zomato's doing that with every restaurant, so it didn't become much news at the end of the day.
- starchild_3001 6y ago
  P1: What's your company's business model? P2: Oh, it's extortion based. P1: Wow, sounds great!
adverbly 6y ago
Is it not possible to design a for-profit, open source, transparent architecture that could allow for a trusted review mechanism? If its clear that there are no code paths or questionable "algorithms" which would permit sale-to-a-higher-bidder, then it might be possible to give a lot more trust in the site as a user. One would think that some sort of production deployment using completely open source/transparent technologies might be possible. I guess the drawback to this would be that you basically couldn't have system admins, and competitors could easily just git clone and copy your whole stack?

zerop 6y ago

Do you think Quora also does it or might do in future? I would trust Quora more looking at the founding team.

gnicholas 6y ago
I would guess that Quora's algorithm could be gamed pretty easily by having an employee leave a positively-biased answer to a question and then having a bunch of other employees upvote the answer. The company could even have an employee seed the question, then have other employees answer and upvote in order to bury other questions that have negative responses. Basically, Quora appears to tolerate quite a bit of spam, which would make it hard for them to be an authoritative source on anything other than "how do I game Quora's algorithm?" (since obviously whoever's answer is highest-rated has won ipso facto).
- WilTimSon 6y ago
  I used to frequent Quora and stopped specifically due to this. Leave a few answers on popular topics, especially about apps, and your inbox is flooded with requests to answer questions like "Is it true that X company is the most amazing and affordable software development outsourcing service?" and "Why is Some_Random_App much better than Popular_App_That_Our_App_Copies?". Sometimes they were brazen enough to post questions about X app with names like XMary or XJohn.
csomar 6y ago
Quora has already gone downhill. They are just a few steps from Yahoo answers. The answers just happen to be more polished and checked for grammatical mistakes.

skybrian 6y ago

Government regulation has its own obvious failure modes (various kinds of corruption, industry capture, or underfunding), so you can't say one is always better than the other. It all depends. There is no guaranteed solution. Hopefully some better Glassdoor competitor will come along.

curtis3389 6y ago
There's middle-ground between for-profit corporations and government. There are social purpose corporations, benefit corporations, non-profits, cooperatives, etc.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  The reason that Consumer Reports is considered the gold standard for reviews is because it is a non-profit that does not accept money from anyone but its subscribers. Too bad people are so used to getting things for "free" on the web these days, or it could do a much better job.
  - wincy 6y ago
    I finally started subscribing to consumer reports. Every time something breaks now in my house I replace it with the top rated product from Consumer Reports. So far it’s going great.
  - everybodyknows 6y ago
    Exactly. There's one other business model that might let the organization stay honest: Accept advertising, but only from unconflicted sources, such as online schools or resume polishers. But this feels like a shoestring business.
- skybrian 6y ago
  Yes, they should be considered too, but they have their own failure modes. I guess what I’m saying is that an organization’s form of government isn’t a reliable indicator of its trustworthiness and you have to consider other signals as well.

polote 6y ago

It is not only reviews companies it is any company in which revenue is not aligned with the company's product objective, you find the same things with dating apps for example. One way to solve that, is to stop offering free service and make users pay to access the service. If you have Glassdoor but it is not the companies who pay but the users then the issue is solved

nerdponx 6y ago

How does Angie's List perform in this regard? The user (i.e. review writer/reader) pays, not the business being reviewed. In theory, that forces the incentives to align correctly.

jdofaz 6y ago
It's freemium now
- Zigurd 6y ago
  Freemium is OK as long as you have to pay to review and perform any other action that would affect the rating of a review, etc.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
No, they take money from service providers: https://www.angieslist.com/faq/how-does-angies-list-make-money/ https://www.angieslist.com/faq/how-does-angies-list-make-mon...

Zigurd 6y ago

This is one reason why nearly all social media (if you take reviews to be a form of that) sites should know their customers' identities and be able to use that information to screen for astroturfing. Even a small payment and requiring a method of payment would reduce astroturfing, and put review sites on a revenue model that would reduce the temptation to become extortion-as-a-service.

uniqueid 6y ago
Ideally, one entity should know the user's identity, and the user can choose what information that entity can make public. Most sites don't need to know a user's legal name, though they may need to know that the user doesn't have a duplicate account and, perhaps, some detail, such as, in the case of Glassdoor, their emloyer.
- function_seven 6y ago
  Unfortunately that still chills legitimate negative reviews. If I know my real identity is tied, somehow, to the gripes I posted about my employer, there's a risk of subpoenas unmasking me when that employer decides I've libeled them. I don't know how to solve this dilemma. Or if it can be solved. Sometimes anonymity is required to get the unvarnished truth, but it also clearly enables sock puppets and astroturfing.
  - uniqueid 6y ago
    Unfortunately that still chills legitimate negative reviews. That is true, but it is a question of degree. If my legal name is attached to a review, I, personally, will not post ever. If I know the only way someone can find my legal name is to subpoena some midwestern chain of brick&mortar notaries, I will post sometimes. Like you, I don't think there is a perfect solution: as a sender, one wants privacy, but as a receiver, one wants transparency. We need some sort of compromise that one can accept for either role.

ViViDboarder 6y ago

Except that if you accept money for better ratings the quality of your suggestions goes down and people stop using your service. This is why many such review sites explicitly do not allow you to pay to alter reviews. Their entire revenue engine would crumble. Some will allow you to solicit reviews (Glassdoor), while others even prohibit that (Yelp, Apple App Store) due to it generally being some way of influencing scores.

polote 6y ago
> people stop using your service. Well the only competitor they have is Indeed, and Indeed belongs to the Recruit Holdings Group, like Glassdoor ;)
jellicle 6y ago
Except that the part where your company makes extra money and you get a fat bonus happens now, while the part where consumers eventually lose faith in your ratings takes years. And you can spend 10% of the extra revenue on a bunch of ads talking about how honest and trustworthy your company is, making it take even longer.

fakedang 6y ago

Ahh, I remember the good old days of Zomato extorting our restaurant. Zomato's rep offered to give us a 5 star rating if we gave him free takeaway food, or a 3 star rating otherwise, during the initial listing. We obviously gave him the free food, but I thought I would be a wise-ass and decided to record him. Posted it online, but turns out, Zomato's doing that with every restaurant, so it didn't become much news at the end of the day.

starchild_3001 6y ago
P1: What's your company's business model? P2: Oh, it's extortion based. P1: Wow, sounds great!

adverbly 6y ago

Is it not possible to design a for-profit, open source, transparent architecture that could allow for a trusted review mechanism? If its clear that there are no code paths or questionable "algorithms" which would permit sale-to-a-higher-bidder, then it might be possible to give a lot more trust in the site as a user. One would think that some sort of production deployment using completely open source/transparent technologies might be possible. I guess the drawback to this would be that you basically couldn't have system admins, and competitors could easily just git clone and copy your whole stack?