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.
The point is that when you're looking for a toaster oven and your friend says that his coworker's spouse just got a ToasterGenius Model Z and they're happy with it, you can be fairly confident they're not shilling for ToasterGenius. They may not know anything about toaster ovens, and they may not have the same toasting needs as you, but at least you can probably trust that their opinion is genuine. Of course, I suppose it could turn out that ToasterGenius is running an MLM and your friend's coworker's spouse hosts ToasterGenius home parties to sell ToasterGenius products!
You probably know your friend well enough to tell if they know anything about toasters or evaluating consumer products in general, and whether their views and needs corresponds to yours. So you rate the recommendation for ToasterGenius Model Z somewhere on the scale from "my friend is a bona fide toaster expert / fanatic", through "my friend toasts as much as I do and is attentive", all the way to "my friend doesn't know first thing about toasters, and also doesn't understand the concept of communicating uncertainty about one's beliefs".
This kind of ability is what makes word-of-mouth within your social network super useful. On top of that, if your friend ends up purposefully shilling for a MLM, they're doing that at the risk of immediately burning your friendship.
(Tangential: MLMs are social cancer that prey on relationships between friends and family members; they should be excised from this planet.)
I'm not saying the point I outlined above is the best outcome for the world, it's just the outcome for me and it's pretty regrettable that we're sliding back into it.
Yes, in the context of a relationship. A "review" from someone one has some kind of relationship is more meaningful. Possibly a weak one, like a fellow HackerNews poster. Which brings back the Internet--helps one form new kinds of relationship.
Same goes for online reviews. Even if a scummy company deletes 1 star reviews, there might still be 2 star ones, or 3 star ones that are (in my experience, anyways) more grounded than the more impulsive 1 and 5 star counterparts. A keen applicant of the scientific method would question a unnatural distribution of high reviews with low information density, not because of prior accusations of foul play, but simply because one wants to come up with a reasoned theory of how the dynamics of review systems play out in general. You may not necessarily have hard evidence that intentional shenanigans are occurring in any given review system, but you can still make up your mind in terms of what are likely factors for why reviews are the way they are and how much weight you're comfortable putting in them.
So, rather than the score being a dimensionless good-or-bad scale, it's a meta analysis of the reviews, judged on multiple dimensions. This means that some companies/restaurants/products simply don't provide enough information for me to form a conclusion despite having a number of reviews that lean towards either "good" or "bad". And that's ok, because the very fact that I've considered so many different dimensions also tells me that there isn't necessarily a single absolute best option.
This, in my mind, seems like a more accurate depiction of reality than blindly ranking by number of 5 star reviews.
Honestly, I don't see how to trust reviews if the reviewers have no skin in the game (either their reputation or money). If identities and reputations can be faked/generated at low cost, then we're back to just money. Honestly, one theory of advertising (like McD and bigC) is that they throw money at pretty ads to convince you that lots of people have given them money so they must be good... it's pay to play, but it's not completely wrong. Limiting reviews to those who have actually bought the item also helps, if you time limit/delay it and weight by the cost of shipping/stocking.
5 years ago on HN someone would have said this is an industry ripe to be 'disrupted'. It can't be hard to create a new review site? Easy VC money, an exit within 5 years by acquisition from Yelp or Glassdoor or LinkedIn/MS.
I've wondered if a somewhat simplistic graph based solution could work, inspired by organizations like medieval guilds and the mafia, where you generally need to be invited to the trust network and promoted to be more trusted within the network as others vouch for your trustworthiness. Suspicious users are highly punished (in the real life examples, often violently) and quickly removed from the network.
Obviously can be gamed like any other system, but would be much harder to do so and you can leverage the vouch/invite graph to detect trusted users that are highly connected to suspicious ones.
Surely there's something like this out there, though? Or is this just not a valuable business problem to solve?
Proving that reviews haven't been removed might actually make this a real application for a blockchain.
You can force a public facing site to stop displaying it, but if it's decentralized it is still there.
The disadvantage being of course there is no way to remove fake/scam reviews.
[1]: Not necessarily a deal-breaker. For perspective, consider that a 10-word transatlantic telegram in 1860 cost the equivalent of $2600 in 2013 USD.
Yes, and only if the words come from the mouths of trusted friends. Everything else is probably tainted by monetary incentives and should be taken with several grains of salt.
Antivaxxers brigading doctors on Yelp & Google. Diehard fandoms brigading Rotten Tomatoes. Sketchy Chinese sellers buying fake Amazon product reviews in FB groups.
Platforms know this by now, so consumers should too. The internet is basically a series of factions competing for amplification from algorithms at this point. Pump up your guy, downrank theirs. Coordinate for an algorithmic boost or trend where possible.
It's just marketing by way of manufactured consensus, not a review.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Steam reviews are interesting because I have started watching someone’s YouTube lets play instead. Even bad ones are mildly interesting and they quickly tell you a lot more about the game than what I get from random reviews.
The best online review system for me is Rotten Tomatoes which shows both what the general public thinks and what the critics do. Looking at say https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_rise_of_skywa... I appreciate many of the viewers liked it, but it’s the critics that I find actually agree with. Yep, worse than the prequels, but not quite walk out of the movie theater bad. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_episode_i_the_pha..., https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_episode_ii_attack..., or https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_episode_iii_reven...
What is a problem is just presenting an average of the ratings, though.
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.
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).
A good review system can exist but it shouldn't be a venture-backed startup expecting unicorn returns.
‘Business Accused of Racist Behavior’
The end result of this is too obvious to require elaboration.
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&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
Source: https://www.chadcheese.com/episodes (scroll down to see the Glassdoor/Indeed episodes)
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 :(
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.
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...
Yes, this the point I was making. This has always been the case: it's just that now it's become much more pathological and widespread on the platform. Partly it sounds like that's due to changes in policy/strategy on the part of Glassdoor, but I think it's also because companies have realised that you can just ask Glassdoor to remove reviews and they will.
Do I feel bad about that specific review being taken down? Not at all, because it was absolutely slanderous to others this person had worked with. But the fact that it happened without any further process does point to an underlying problem.
It's a long time since I've used the site but I believe companies might have the right to post public responses to reviews. Beyond this maybe some sort of dispute resolution process would be the way to go.
Still, I can't really figure out how to make it work: if it's cheap and easy for reviewers to post reviews, and cheap and easy for companies to get them taken down or otherwise manipulate them, you're always going to end up with a review service that's essentially worthless and can't be trusted.
If only there were some other way.
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.
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.
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.
[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/improving-work...
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.
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)
The whole “pivot” sounds like uninformed heresay.
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.