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Surely a simple solution here is for Glassdoor to show removed reviews with a simple placeholder text and a reason for removal. Glassdoor could also account fo

Surely a simple solution here is for Glassdoor to show removed reviews with a simple placeholder text and a reason for removal. Glassdoor could also account for these in its overall rankings, and show a graph plotting number of removals against time. That way companies legitimately removing invalid reviews can continue to do so, but those gaming the system would have that activity show up. If they plotted submitted reviews as well you could see when these periods of mass removals and "forced" positive reviews happened. Glassdoor could also provide a short summary of "X reviews removed in the last Y days - this is lower/higher/inline with the average". All of this is easily within the power of Glassdoor to do and keeps the platform fair for both parties.

lozenge 3y ago
Glassdoor runs a job board, they want the appearance of neutrality not the actual achievement of it.
ritzaco 3y ago
You think glassdoor wants to be fair to both parties when one party (business) pays them in order to help exploit the other party (employee)? Maybe it sounds cynical, but that is the business model.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  I've been designing a worker-owned (both the startup and the user data owned by those 'worker' users) Glassdoor alternative. Wonder about how to grow interest in it. Pay sharing is another useful feature of Glassdoor that could be done better in a worker-centric way. Another aspect of it is to refer/resell self-hosting for users to completely own their own data (such as Bunny CDN which has very wallet-friendly prepaid schemes and a referral program) so they don't have to worry about what the service owner does. It would then be a kind of decentralized network of mini Glassdoors about the workers current or past employers, where one worker would spin it up and their peers can use. Each would decide what to leave public-facing and private-facing for the workers, and could even monetize for the workers via selling their data as Glassdoor does for things like market comp survey data so that workers could privately share comp data amongst each other and publicly sell access to extra anonymized summaries of that data. This would be tied together into a user friendly iOS/macOS app to manage the deployment of the site. How does that sound?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    > This would be tied together into a user friendly iOS/macOS app Why? Providing a web client would drastically expand your potential customer-base.
    - wahnfrieden 3y ago
      The web client would be for most users, the native iOS/macOS client would be for the smaller group that manages the deployments (would be one person at a company or in a friend group). I'm working on cross-plat Swift strategies to bring this to Windows later.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        I'm still confused. I can't deploy or buy your app without iOS or MacOS?
        wahnfrieden 3y ago
        It's a good point, I'll find a good way to start earlier with cross-plat deployment management. Between the two of us we have strong fullstack skills in web and iOS/Apple ecosystem. Apple App Store distribution and IAP are a strong part of our typical app strategies (I'm able to drive huge user growth via App Store) but this approach for this idea needs more thought because the deploy-manager person for this app wouldn't be the one we'd charge IAP to. I'm not actually sure how to make money off this idea yet. It's also potentially linux-runnable (the management tools) with a native apple frontend, then later can explore bringing to win/web I've been moving more of my iOS app core biz logic to JS and exploring cross plat Swift for running more across web and windows, while still leaning hard into the nice parts of Apple ecosystem, so that whatever solution I find for this is easier We're also doing an app using https://github.com/live-codes/livecodes https://github.com/live-codes/livecodes to move a lot more languages/envs capability into the client which might enable some good web and ios cross plat capabilities. Anyway besides the platform question, interested in any other feedback from anyone
- bazmattaz 3y ago
  Yes exactly. Same as TrustPilot. If you pay for their top tier you can remove reviews that go against their TOS, funny thing is they let you the customer decide if the review goes against the TOS. Complete shambles
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    Does anyone put stock in TrustPilot reviews? I have seen some companies brag about them and wondered if they are actually trusted elsewhere (I'm in the US).
- spacemadness 3y ago
  Yelp did (does?) this same thing. So many of these type of companies are run by unethical “business leaders” in that their business model is to hold data hostage and filter it in the right way for higher paying clients.
  - dicknuckle 3y ago
    BBB as well
- byby 3y ago
  [dead]
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  I only refer blind reviews now. Keeps things pretty honest.
okl 3y ago
I think a first question could be if it is in Glassdoor's interest to be fair/objective for both parties. I would assume that users are more likely to visit and engage when drama, conflict and emotions are to be found in the reviews. It also gives companies an incentive to respond on the platform because of the reputational damage.
- hyperdimension 3y ago
  To your first question: not unless employees (as a group) are willing to pay Glassdoor more than the employers. The economics are biased toward the employers unfortunately. See Yelp as another example.
pmoriarty 3y ago
"Surely a simple solution here is for Glassdoor to show removed reviews with a simple placeholder text and a reason for removal." Completely unverifiable and easy to fake.
cgb223 3y ago
Who pays Glassdoor to keep it in business? Glassdoor wants to make that group happy so they can keep making money
- Lio 3y ago
  The Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. If Glassdoor's real customers are companies using it for hiring then that's who they will prioritise unless that becomes an existential threat to their reputation.
shp0ngle 3y ago
You cannot publish libel even if you preface it with “this is a libel”.
- lazide 3y ago
  You can certainly say ‘in my opinion…’ however, as long as you’re not making statements that can be factually proven false. ‘In my opinion the New York Times is a pile of lying garbage’ or whatever for instance isn’t libel.
  - brookst 3y ago
    Are you saying Glassdoor should rewrite user posts that the company claims are libelous? Honestly I’m not sure how many negative posts could reasonably be considered libel, but for those that genuinely could be, Glassdoor is probably better served by just removing them than wading into liability both from posting and from modifying them.
    - lazide 3y ago
      Nope. That should be between the company and whoever did the post, frankly. I don’t see how Glassdoor would have any liability unless they were somehow presenting it as their own opinion. They might want to take it down as part of overall community moderation if it violates their TOS of course, say if it includes cursing, or has racist remarks or whatever. I’m pointing out libel has a definition, and posting what is clearly an opinion isn’t it. It has to be making statements which are presenting false facts as true. That they’ll almost certainly find ways to take down ‘undesired’ messages that paying customers don’t like seems like something they do, which is shitty and undermines their nominal reason for existing, is… sad but seems to be what is going on. Nothing to do with libel.
      - chickenpotpie 3y ago
        * user posts anonymous review * Company tells Glassdoor the review is false and to take it down * Glassdoor says the review is from an anonymous user and not them, so they should sue the user * Company asks for the name of the user so they can sue them for libel. * Glassdoor refuses to turn over the user because it ruins the anonymity * Company sues Glassdoor for libel because they refuse to produce proof they didn't create the libel. Glassdoor now has to face the lawsuit or turn over the user and destroy the anonymous premise of their website thats fundamental to their business model
hedora 3y ago
It looks like archive.org scrapes reviews: https://web.archive.org/web/20200625025452/https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Twitter-Reviews-E100569.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20200625025452/https://www.glass... (Hey, I wonder why twitter's CEO rating in 2023 is almost 100%-(rating in 2020)) I wonder if their scraper goes deep enough to let a third party list compute a list of removed reviews. Honestly, that seems like better signal than the non-reviewed reviews at this point.
lisasays 3y ago
All of this is easily within the power of Glassdoor to do and keeps the platform fair for both parties. Indeed -- assuming that Glassdoor actually wants to be "fair" and informative, in some meaningful sense. Unfortunately its business model stands in the way of that.
hn2017 3y ago
[dead]
dehrmann 3y ago
They can also detect when employers excessively flag. I'm not sure if that means they pause their flagging privileges for 6 months, show it as a metric, or something else.

lozenge 3y ago

Glassdoor runs a job board, they want the appearance of neutrality not the actual achievement of it.

ritzaco 3y ago

You think glassdoor wants to be fair to both parties when one party (business) pays them in order to help exploit the other party (employee)? Maybe it sounds cynical, but that is the business model.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
I've been designing a worker-owned (both the startup and the user data owned by those 'worker' users) Glassdoor alternative. Wonder about how to grow interest in it. Pay sharing is another useful feature of Glassdoor that could be done better in a worker-centric way. Another aspect of it is to refer/resell self-hosting for users to completely own their own data (such as Bunny CDN which has very wallet-friendly prepaid schemes and a referral program) so they don't have to worry about what the service owner does. It would then be a kind of decentralized network of mini Glassdoors about the workers current or past employers, where one worker would spin it up and their peers can use. Each would decide what to leave public-facing and private-facing for the workers, and could even monetize for the workers via selling their data as Glassdoor does for things like market comp survey data so that workers could privately share comp data amongst each other and publicly sell access to extra anonymized summaries of that data. This would be tied together into a user friendly iOS/macOS app to manage the deployment of the site. How does that sound?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > This would be tied together into a user friendly iOS/macOS app Why? Providing a web client would drastically expand your potential customer-base.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    The web client would be for most users, the native iOS/macOS client would be for the smaller group that manages the deployments (would be one person at a company or in a friend group). I'm working on cross-plat Swift strategies to bring this to Windows later.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      I'm still confused. I can't deploy or buy your app without iOS or MacOS?
      - wahnfrieden 3y ago
        It's a good point, I'll find a good way to start earlier with cross-plat deployment management. Between the two of us we have strong fullstack skills in web and iOS/Apple ecosystem. Apple App Store distribution and IAP are a strong part of our typical app strategies (I'm able to drive huge user growth via App Store) but this approach for this idea needs more thought because the deploy-manager person for this app wouldn't be the one we'd charge IAP to. I'm not actually sure how to make money off this idea yet. It's also potentially linux-runnable (the management tools) with a native apple frontend, then later can explore bringing to win/web I've been moving more of my iOS app core biz logic to JS and exploring cross plat Swift for running more across web and windows, while still leaning hard into the nice parts of Apple ecosystem, so that whatever solution I find for this is easier We're also doing an app using https://github.com/live-codes/livecodes https://github.com/live-codes/livecodes to move a lot more languages/envs capability into the client which might enable some good web and ios cross plat capabilities. Anyway besides the platform question, interested in any other feedback from anyone
bazmattaz 3y ago
Yes exactly. Same as TrustPilot. If you pay for their top tier you can remove reviews that go against their TOS, funny thing is they let you the customer decide if the review goes against the TOS. Complete shambles
- gnicholas 3y ago
  Does anyone put stock in TrustPilot reviews? I have seen some companies brag about them and wondered if they are actually trusted elsewhere (I'm in the US).
spacemadness 3y ago
Yelp did (does?) this same thing. So many of these type of companies are run by unethical “business leaders” in that their business model is to hold data hostage and filter it in the right way for higher paying clients.
- dicknuckle 3y ago
  BBB as well
byby 3y ago
[dead]
darth_avocado 3y ago
I only refer blind reviews now. Keeps things pretty honest.

okl 3y ago

I think a first question could be if it is in Glassdoor's interest to be fair/objective for both parties. I would assume that users are more likely to visit and engage when drama, conflict and emotions are to be found in the reviews. It also gives companies an incentive to respond on the platform because of the reputational damage.

hyperdimension 3y ago
To your first question: not unless employees (as a group) are willing to pay Glassdoor more than the employers. The economics are biased toward the employers unfortunately. See Yelp as another example.

pmoriarty 3y ago

"Surely a simple solution here is for Glassdoor to show removed reviews with a simple placeholder text and a reason for removal." Completely unverifiable and easy to fake.

cgb223 3y ago

Who pays Glassdoor to keep it in business? Glassdoor wants to make that group happy so they can keep making money

Lio 3y ago
The Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. If Glassdoor's real customers are companies using it for hiring then that's who they will prioritise unless that becomes an existential threat to their reputation.

shp0ngle 3y ago

You cannot publish libel even if you preface it with “this is a libel”.

lazide 3y ago
You can certainly say ‘in my opinion…’ however, as long as you’re not making statements that can be factually proven false. ‘In my opinion the New York Times is a pile of lying garbage’ or whatever for instance isn’t libel.
- brookst 3y ago
  Are you saying Glassdoor should rewrite user posts that the company claims are libelous? Honestly I’m not sure how many negative posts could reasonably be considered libel, but for those that genuinely could be, Glassdoor is probably better served by just removing them than wading into liability both from posting and from modifying them.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Nope. That should be between the company and whoever did the post, frankly. I don’t see how Glassdoor would have any liability unless they were somehow presenting it as their own opinion. They might want to take it down as part of overall community moderation if it violates their TOS of course, say if it includes cursing, or has racist remarks or whatever. I’m pointing out libel has a definition, and posting what is clearly an opinion isn’t it. It has to be making statements which are presenting false facts as true. That they’ll almost certainly find ways to take down ‘undesired’ messages that paying customers don’t like seems like something they do, which is shitty and undermines their nominal reason for existing, is… sad but seems to be what is going on. Nothing to do with libel.
    - chickenpotpie 3y ago
      * user posts anonymous review * Company tells Glassdoor the review is false and to take it down * Glassdoor says the review is from an anonymous user and not them, so they should sue the user * Company asks for the name of the user so they can sue them for libel. * Glassdoor refuses to turn over the user because it ruins the anonymity * Company sues Glassdoor for libel because they refuse to produce proof they didn't create the libel. Glassdoor now has to face the lawsuit or turn over the user and destroy the anonymous premise of their website thats fundamental to their business model

hedora 3y ago

It looks like archive.org scrapes reviews: https://web.archive.org/web/20200625025452/https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Twitter-Reviews-E100569.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20200625025452/https://www.glass... (Hey, I wonder why twitter's CEO rating in 2023 is almost 100%-(rating in 2020)) I wonder if their scraper goes deep enough to let a third party list compute a list of removed reviews. Honestly, that seems like better signal than the non-reviewed reviews at this point.

lisasays 3y ago

All of this is easily within the power of Glassdoor to do and keeps the platform fair for both parties. Indeed -- assuming that Glassdoor actually wants to be "fair" and informative, in some meaningful sense. Unfortunately its business model stands in the way of that.

hn2017 3y ago

[dead]

dehrmann 3y ago

They can also detect when employers excessively flag. I'm not sure if that means they pause their flagging privileges for 6 months, show it as a metric, or something else.