8 ms·

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

by everdrive 6y ago

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).
Retric 6y ago
I think the core issue isn’t paid reviews etc. I think the problem is trying to come up with an arbitrary standard that this restaurant/GPU/shoe stands relative to all others. The simple truth is I want to know two different things, is it functional and would I like it. Star rankings and even short text reviews don’t really answer those questions. A 1 star review because it was DOA says nothing about failure rates. People also have different preferences on things like cost, spicy food, or what looks tacky making a 3 vs 4 star review mostly meaningless. This is why independent reviews like consumer reports are so useful. Look at a comparison between similar devices and consider tradeoffs. Or find a movie reviewer with similar tastes and you can generally just follow their suggestions. Net result reviewers and rating systems just don’t have great incentives which devolves into companies just gaming the algorithm.
- alisonatwork 6y ago
  I agree that star reviews are not very helpful, but text reviews absolutely can be. It's true that there might be some fake reviews in there, and that some people are posting in the heat of the moment and will give a biased perspective, but read enough of them and you can get a feeling for common themes that impact certain types of people. Steam is a great example. If you click through to the person who made the review, you can also look at other games they own or other things they reviewed to get a sense the kind of person they are. If they're like you, then their review is probably going to be more helpful to you. If they're very much NOT like you, then that's a useful data point too. I think one of the special challenges with Glassdoor is that reviewers are anonymous, in order to protect them from career-related backlash. This makes it harder to understand if a particular reviewer's experience is something that will also affect you. But if you think about it, that is a real indictment of the state of workplace relations - workers are at such a structural disadvantage that they are terrified of sharing candid views about current or even former employers in a way that could come back to bite them. I know i've gone out of my way to try to avoid putting identifying information into Glassdoor, and even toned down some criticism as insurance just in case the employer did figure out who i was. That's not a good thing - it only serves to make my review less helpful! This is all the more reason why it's so disappointing to me that Glassdoor has openly shifted to be a service focused on corporate branding - employers already had all the power to start with.
nickbauman 6y ago
We've come full circle. Word of mouth is all you can trust. The Internet as a great "disintermediation" medium is over.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pjbk 6y ago
  Taken over by the humbugs of always that now are computer savvy... It was a matter of time.
  - gary_0 6y ago
    Eternal September 2.0
- berkes 6y ago
  From this I get you mean "word of mouth" in a very physical way? As in "my cousin Jane says..."? Because "Word of mouth" over the internet would imply that The Internet still has a big role to play in disintermediation. Would "reviews" from your network, any network, physical, or digital, of people you know, be valuable? I believe that a "review" is only useful if you know the reviewer well enough. Regardless of the medium. For example, when "angry uncle Joe" rants about some libtard-foreigner-restaurant-scum which is ruining the neighborhood with their horrible foreign food, I know how to take that 'review' of the restaurant. Same when aunt Carol explains how she heard from the new boyfriend of the cousin of Foo that her brother said that she heard from.. and so on. But when a friend who knows a lot about fintech explains that SomeBank is really doing a lot of interesting tech and hiring, I also know how to take that. If you know who the "review" comes from, you can trust it. Otherwise you cannot. I assume this comes down to "word of mouth", though.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    I don't think it needs to be physical but if I google a company and a big rant about them on reddit comes up coupled with a bunch of positive feedback on linkedin and glassdoor then I'm going to trust the reddit poster more. It might be someone grumping without fair grounds about unfair treatment but that's the only testimonial you can really trust these days.
at-fates-hands 6y ago
I would also throw Yelp in there now that they're instituting a form of a social credit system by allowing a user to accuse a business of being racist which then flags the account with a message that says: ‘Business Accused of Racist Behavior’ The end result of this is too obvious to require elaboration.
- gotoeleven 6y ago
  Hopefully we can extend this helpful system to every day life, maybe with some sort of reddish lettering system whereby we attach a symbol to the clothes of those who have committed an -ism or a -phobic.
  - westmeal 6y ago
    Hear me out, what about an armband?
mlrtime 6y ago
Trust is valuable, build your business , give it away for free, build trust, then sell out.
Diederich 6y ago
My wife and I used to use Yelp at our go-to, day to day review platform. After some of my wife's customers directly experienced some serious WTF behaviour on Yelp's part, our trust in it was, as you said, completely broken. I'm not at all surprised that Glassdoor is playing similar games. The following isn't necessarily meant to disagree with you. A common thread is that Yelp and Glassdoor directly make money based on their reviews. That's their core product. Other comments about how trust should be a core product are relevant, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening. My wife and I started using Google reviews. To be clear: we are by no means starry-eyed Google fans. We're quite aware of many their problems and WTFisms. In this case, though, unless I'm mistaken, Google reviews are at most very indirectly a product for them. This is important, because in my mind, that makes it far less likely for them to meaningfully/substantively fuck around with the results. It would be easy (and perhaps fun!) for me and anyone else reading this to inject doubt into this assertion. I'm happily open to additional illumination here, particularly as far as a practical daily use review system.
- np- 6y ago
  A counter argument is that if Google doesn’t care enough to manipulate its reviews because the stakes are too low, then they might also turn a blind eye to restaurants, businesses, and other listings manipulating the system themselves (again assuming it’s too small time for Google to care). But I don’t have a better solution either, my wife and I have followed almost your exact same pattern of relying on Yelp until it became untrustworthy and then Google Reviews (which is what I still use now).
- ahelwer 6y ago
  I've personally seen my (and others') negative google reviews removed. I reposted mine since I'd saved it; we'll see how long it stays up.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Google reviews are gamed by companies that have thousands of accounts to throw positive reviews at their clients pages.
- eska 6y ago
dheera 6y ago
The main problem is that review systems of today are funded by investors who want profits, not honesty. That will always translate into unscrupulous companies paying to manipulate reviews, which will generate more cash than honest reviews. A good review system can exist but it shouldn't be a venture-backed startup expecting unicorn returns.
Cyberspy 6y ago
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&stars=1 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

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).

Retric 6y ago

I think the core issue isn’t paid reviews etc. I think the problem is trying to come up with an arbitrary standard that this restaurant/GPU/shoe stands relative to all others. The simple truth is I want to know two different things, is it functional and would I like it. Star rankings and even short text reviews don’t really answer those questions. A 1 star review because it was DOA says nothing about failure rates. People also have different preferences on things like cost, spicy food, or what looks tacky making a 3 vs 4 star review mostly meaningless. This is why independent reviews like consumer reports are so useful. Look at a comparison between similar devices and consider tradeoffs. Or find a movie reviewer with similar tastes and you can generally just follow their suggestions. Net result reviewers and rating systems just don’t have great incentives which devolves into companies just gaming the algorithm.

alisonatwork 6y ago
I agree that star reviews are not very helpful, but text reviews absolutely can be. It's true that there might be some fake reviews in there, and that some people are posting in the heat of the moment and will give a biased perspective, but read enough of them and you can get a feeling for common themes that impact certain types of people. Steam is a great example. If you click through to the person who made the review, you can also look at other games they own or other things they reviewed to get a sense the kind of person they are. If they're like you, then their review is probably going to be more helpful to you. If they're very much NOT like you, then that's a useful data point too. I think one of the special challenges with Glassdoor is that reviewers are anonymous, in order to protect them from career-related backlash. This makes it harder to understand if a particular reviewer's experience is something that will also affect you. But if you think about it, that is a real indictment of the state of workplace relations - workers are at such a structural disadvantage that they are terrified of sharing candid views about current or even former employers in a way that could come back to bite them. I know i've gone out of my way to try to avoid putting identifying information into Glassdoor, and even toned down some criticism as insurance just in case the employer did figure out who i was. That's not a good thing - it only serves to make my review less helpful! This is all the more reason why it's so disappointing to me that Glassdoor has openly shifted to be a service focused on corporate branding - employers already had all the power to start with.

nickbauman 6y ago

We've come full circle. Word of mouth is all you can trust. The Internet as a great "disintermediation" medium is over.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pjbk 6y ago
Taken over by the humbugs of always that now are computer savvy... It was a matter of time.
- gary_0 6y ago
  Eternal September 2.0
berkes 6y ago
From this I get you mean "word of mouth" in a very physical way? As in "my cousin Jane says..."? Because "Word of mouth" over the internet would imply that The Internet still has a big role to play in disintermediation. Would "reviews" from your network, any network, physical, or digital, of people you know, be valuable? I believe that a "review" is only useful if you know the reviewer well enough. Regardless of the medium. For example, when "angry uncle Joe" rants about some libtard-foreigner-restaurant-scum which is ruining the neighborhood with their horrible foreign food, I know how to take that 'review' of the restaurant. Same when aunt Carol explains how she heard from the new boyfriend of the cousin of Foo that her brother said that she heard from.. and so on. But when a friend who knows a lot about fintech explains that SomeBank is really doing a lot of interesting tech and hiring, I also know how to take that. If you know who the "review" comes from, you can trust it. Otherwise you cannot. I assume this comes down to "word of mouth", though.
- munk-a 6y ago
  I don't think it needs to be physical but if I google a company and a big rant about them on reddit comes up coupled with a bunch of positive feedback on linkedin and glassdoor then I'm going to trust the reddit poster more. It might be someone grumping without fair grounds about unfair treatment but that's the only testimonial you can really trust these days.

at-fates-hands 6y ago

I would also throw Yelp in there now that they're instituting a form of a social credit system by allowing a user to accuse a business of being racist which then flags the account with a message that says: ‘Business Accused of Racist Behavior’ The end result of this is too obvious to require elaboration.

gotoeleven 6y ago
Hopefully we can extend this helpful system to every day life, maybe with some sort of reddish lettering system whereby we attach a symbol to the clothes of those who have committed an -ism or a -phobic.
- westmeal 6y ago
  Hear me out, what about an armband?

mlrtime 6y ago

Trust is valuable, build your business , give it away for free, build trust, then sell out.

Diederich 6y ago

My wife and I used to use Yelp at our go-to, day to day review platform. After some of my wife's customers directly experienced some serious WTF behaviour on Yelp's part, our trust in it was, as you said, completely broken. I'm not at all surprised that Glassdoor is playing similar games. The following isn't necessarily meant to disagree with you. A common thread is that Yelp and Glassdoor directly make money based on their reviews. That's their core product. Other comments about how trust should be a core product are relevant, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening. My wife and I started using Google reviews. To be clear: we are by no means starry-eyed Google fans. We're quite aware of many their problems and WTFisms. In this case, though, unless I'm mistaken, Google reviews are at most very indirectly a product for them. This is important, because in my mind, that makes it far less likely for them to meaningfully/substantively fuck around with the results. It would be easy (and perhaps fun!) for me and anyone else reading this to inject doubt into this assertion. I'm happily open to additional illumination here, particularly as far as a practical daily use review system.

np- 6y ago
A counter argument is that if Google doesn’t care enough to manipulate its reviews because the stakes are too low, then they might also turn a blind eye to restaurants, businesses, and other listings manipulating the system themselves (again assuming it’s too small time for Google to care). But I don’t have a better solution either, my wife and I have followed almost your exact same pattern of relying on Yelp until it became untrustworthy and then Google Reviews (which is what I still use now).
ahelwer 6y ago
I've personally seen my (and others') negative google reviews removed. I reposted mine since I'd saved it; we'll see how long it stays up.
heavyset_go 6y ago
Google reviews are gamed by companies that have thousands of accounts to throw positive reviews at their clients pages.
eska 6y ago

dheera 6y ago

The main problem is that review systems of today are funded by investors who want profits, not honesty. That will always translate into unscrupulous companies paying to manipulate reviews, which will generate more cash than honest reviews. A good review system can exist but it shouldn't be a venture-backed startup expecting unicorn returns.

Cyberspy 6y ago

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&stars=1 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