No one trusts these review companies actually. They simply exist to extort entities that get reviewed either to remove negative reviews or promote or even auto-post fake positive reviews.

Yelp is a classic example that did this for years.

> No one trusts these review companies actually.

Most people do trust them, but shouldn't.

Actually you are right, sorry. I was exaggerating but it is true that it is mostly the naive/average users of internet that do place any significant credibility in online reviews

I'd say, like most online stuff, I put some weight into them in the absence of other information, but would not really rely on them for a high impact decision. When we're talking about a restaurant or something, there's only so much effort you can put in to confirming past performance before you're better off just trying it. Which is guess is what some places are banking on, e.g. those that rely on reviews to drive customers in, as opposed to catering to community or regulars

Can you foresee a scenario where a review site could legitimately exist without turning to synthetic reviews, dark UI patterns, or outright brand extortion?

Only if it was driven by a non-profit org I guess

Consumer Reports has entered the chat

Consumer Reports has well known biases though, which colors their reviews. For example, they tend to rank American car companies unfairly low. Their vehicle issue score isn't weighted - trouble linking phone to infotainment is the same as engine exploding. Cars with more tech -> lower scores, even if they're mechanically flawless.

Honda has moved down their rankings due to reliability problems with their infotainment systems. Lumping transmission failure at 50,000 miles with some audio system breaking is too coarse.

Perhaps a site that included both reviews of companies and (paid) job postings from reviewed companies could survive.

Of course misbehaving companies would probably stop spending there, but that might not be a bad thing.

Wouldn't that set up a conflict of interest for the review site? I'd trust such a site even less than normal (and normal is pretty close to not at all).

Sure, in kind of the same way that steam has a conflict of interest with reviews for games. But I tend to trust steam reviews at least generally, in fact more than I do most reviews on products I am looking at.

It is possible to exist in this space with a potential conflict, as long as you position yourself appropriately. If your interest is to serve "decent" companies by providing them with interested candidates, it can work.

It'll work fine until the site decides chasing profit is more important than integrity of the system, so probably right around the time they're looking for more funding.

At the same time, unfortunately we will have a hard time finding companies that will actually thrive on that website, since a staggering majority of them are just ridden with crooks in the management layer and above.

True, though this should increase the value of the listings that remain. Companies that can hold their own here gain the value of being respected in the community.

Not a review site, but networks of people I trust directly is about the only thing that works. As soon as this grows beyond the trust I have in the network, the proxy trust tapers off quickly. That's the problem with something like glassdoor.

That’s why the most lucrative thing is to get people to ‘connect’ their networks digitally on social media and manipulate them. I hope we see a return to irl networks

I’m designing a worker cooperative owned and self hosted distributed solution

https://www.productreview.com.au/ is the only site I've ever seen that does a good job at user reviews. Each review has to be accompanied by a verifiable receipt.

Here's their operating model, which sounds like a mix of paid brand manager subscriptions and advertising: https://support.productreview.com.au/hc/en-us/articles/36000...

> verifiable receipt

lol. the current amazon scam is to purchase the product (ship to a random address to defeat “common address” detection) then leave the fake review

Interesting but not relevant here - they require a photo of a physical receipt, and they're hand reviewed. Anything is scammable given enough effort though, no doubt.

that’s exactly the amazon scam, executed with a verified receipt and “hand reviewed”. or did you mean, manually moderated? that’s no obstacle.

for amazon the receipt is guaranteed authentic as the product will have been verifiably purchased on amazon. for a 3p site receipts can be trivially fabricated

Btw how do they detect fake receipts, if at all?

I'm wondering as there are quite a handful of fake receipt generators on the internet

Yes. With a paid subscriber base and no advertising their interests would be aligned with the reader's. If you're not paying for the review they will ultimately build loyalty toward their funders.

Clearly the solution is a review company for review companies.

Ah yes, the Coast Guard will police the police!

Talking to some friends who are job-seeking, I do know they check them.

Not so much positive reviews, but negative reviews are believed.

> No one trusts these review companies

It's not so much that I'd read the reviews, but ranking of results is fatally flawed thanks to these practices.

For many queries (restaurant in town X, book in genre Y) there are simply so many candidate results that ranking is the one and only thing to determine a (much, MUCH) smaller candidate set that the customer might actually engage with. How often do you click through to page 2 of your search results?

I know a non-engineer who left DesktopMetal with a similar sentiment.

Yep, I noticed the exact same thing. Glassdoor is a complete scam, and it has been for as long as I've had a career. I do not even check anymore.

So is it basically true that there is no objective information out there anymore, because anyone running a successful site gets corrupted with money?

That's a big broad brush you just swiped with, but yeah, I kind of agree with it.

Blind seems somewhat OK?

I’d say Consumer Reports and NYT wire cutter are pretty objective…

Their bigger issue is that company quality doesn’t change much from year to year, so the pans that were good in 2019 are probably still good now, which is boring.

Wire cutter is hardly objective - check out their bike lock reviews. Every single recommended product is from Kryptonite.

To be fair, most of the alternatives are garbage, but also most of Kryptonite’s own products are garbage. There are ~3 worthwhile bike locks on the market. 2 of them are made by Kryptonite. The rest provide the same value as the TSA. Mostly theatrical.

On youtube there are videos from an expert lockpicker, I can't remember the name, where he goes on lockpicking kryptonite locks. He explains in great detail what he expected more from the high end, but his recommendation by the end was still a kryptonite lock, not necessary the ultimate, and said that unless you are ready to lose the bike, unless it's in sight, there is very little you can do. And with an angle grinder you are doomed either way

That would be the Lockpicking Lawyer.

That's the one indeed!

Wirecutter is not objective.

https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...

Previous discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141719

It depends on where they get their money, and how devoted to being ethical the place is. Consumer Reports is a good example of how to do this right.

I think it has to be a nonprofit or individual who isn't doing it to make any money, though. If it's a money-maker, you can't trust it.

The only good source is a network of people you know in person. If you don't have one, working on open source projects is a good way to bootstrap one.

Only way to get something useful is to read between the lines. If there are full text reviews. But that takes time. Glassdoor, tripadvisor, anything.

It’s only a matter of time before generative AI makes even that type of analysis impossible

A blockchain based solution like bitcoin or ethereum must be developed but for customer reviews. If your cryptographically signed and verifiable review went and sat on the disk of every computer on the planet, there will be no options to manipulate it.

But those "seven positive" reviews will still show up! When I was calculating the NPS scores at a former job, IIRC you need seven or eight 100% scores to offset one low score. Interesting that's what happened to the Desktop Metal poster.

But (presumably) those seven posters would be motivated by big tech money and thus be identified by some algorithm or the other in that blockchain? And/or you being a genuine reviewer would have a more organic activity across the blockchain with other products too compared to theirs and that will add to the weight?

There's just very little organic activity on a site like Glassdoor. You changing jobs, and thus naturally having any kind of inclination to post something may be few and far between, and you might not even think of uploading a review unless you're disgruntled (read: motivated).

> (presumably) those seven posters would be motivated by big tech money

Probably not, I think. They're more likely to be employees or friends/family of the company doing it because they were required or asked to.

Yeah except there would still be a mechanism for revoking or moderating bad reviews because people would use the platform to review bomb any company they took issue with. The review might still be on the chain's history, but the moderation tool would still be created with good intentions, with a new transaction on a later block that basically revokes the "validity" of the bad review. Similar mechanisms can be seen in NFTs, where you can update the NFTs metadata.

I've experienced this almost verbatim - put up a factual (at least from my view) account of working with a previous employer, a "warts and all" review. Next week I see about ten 5-star reviews each with a single sentence something like "This is a great place to work!".

However, when searching out the low-down on a potential new employer, I only read the one and two star reviews - if they're pretty spurious then I feel more comfortable taking a role there. If however the poor reviews contain lots of pretty specific complaints, I find them more believable that the single sentence "everything is awesome here" style reviews.

I've considered making a browser extension where you can click a review to ignore it and have the average ratings recalculate automatically.

Same is happening to Google Maps.

I and other reviewers had left negative reviews for Cosuno Ventures GmbH as it's an incredibly toxic and horrible place to work in. I received a take-down notice from a German Google Maps review employee saying that Cosuno is claiming it's a false review and they don't know how who am I. Even though I worked at the company for 4 months with the CTO and had responded to the e-mail with documents signed by the CEO and CTO.

They're rocking a 5 star review now. I didn't receive a response from Google and my appeal has been ignored. I still have the company's t-shirt in the countryside.

Heh, one of my friends wrote a negative review about his landlord's Immobilien company. Got sued and had to pay him the amount of his deposit.

I bet I'd be at risk of getting sued in Germany even if I wrote a positive review about a company. The moment you post an opinion online you are opening yourself as a target.

Germany is not customer-review friendly. I got two legal threats over a non-descript 3-star google maps review of a deeply mediocre Restaurant for maliciously damaging their business reputation. Google made me provide receipts to prove I had been there.

ah damn i think i will go delete some reviews right now

Review writers should start using code just like German employers do in the (mandated by law) employee reviews.

Like "Put in great effort" = absolute shit

I went to a pediatrician near where I lived. Long story short, she was very toxic, making ultimatums and giving what was revealed as dubious practice. I consulted other similar pediatricians, who all gave me radically different answers than hers.

As a result, I chose to write a detailed review explaining why I thought she was unprofessional, citing examples. Of course, my review got nuked.

Same happened with a photo shop that screw up a photo development for some films. I left a factual review, with a sample in pictures. I can see my review with my account, but no one else can.

>can see my review with my account, but no one else can.

Your review got shadow-removed. That's a new one on me.

At a healthcare tech startup I worked at for every negative review we got management made us write three positive reviews. The owners daughter would get all of her friends from college to write more and more positive reviews.

It was so obvious, any fake review written by HR will always have "keep doing what you're doing!" in the "advice to management" section. Like, even a moderately happy employee will actually have something to say in the "advice to management" section. Only a shill will say, "Keep doing what you're doing!"

" The owners daughter would get all of her friends from college to write more and more positive reviews."

A cottage industry of liars. I was pretty naive in college and I still would have been skeptical about that.

I swear the 'keep doing what you're doing' must either be the standard HR planted review (I wasn't invited to the HR conference where they learned that!), or it's GD's own spam for pay. I've seen that too frequently at toxic jobs for it to be coincidence.

Luckily, just like Amazon reviews, it's pretty easy to determine worthwhile info from how specific and balanced it is. The aggregate scores are obviously worthless, because either shills or spurned employees taint the mix.

I enjoy when there are responses from the business: that can often show egotistical management that thinks their poo doesn't stink.

Heard the same from a friend of a friend, they would game Trip Advisor reviews by giving discounts to customers and the daughter would make accounts and leave positive reviews all the time.

There seriously needs to be a watchdog group or AI service (startup idea!) that vets reviews with heuristics like anomaly detection for VPN ip address reviews in succession or browser fingerprinting.

Also ChatGPT is gonna make writing unique reviews a thing of the past. Expect fake reviews sounding indistinguishable from genuine human writing. We are screwed.

Yep. I’ve experience almost exactly the same in the past.

I’ve always just assumed glassdoor was a fake / scam site since.

Another case where web annotations would be useful.

Recently: iAnnotate – Whatever happened to the web as an annotation system? (2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36559758

huh? how so? what stops the exact sort of gaming at glassdoor et al, from also occurring via some web annotation system?

I definitely believe that. Years ago, I had an interview scheduled with a bank’s IT department. Checked their Glassdoor page and it was littered with negative reviews, with obviously fake positive reviews peppered in.

I took the interview anyway because I really needed work at the time. Got some 1-on-1 time with the IT guys and the first thing they said was,

“You read the reviews on Glassdoor, didn’t you?” “Yes..” “Well, don’t worry, IT is pretty isolated from all that”

Cool, I guess?

Next, I got some time with a VP. He saw on my resume that I’d done some work for a Christian church. He said,

“Yeah, I love to debate religion at the water cooler!”

Had he taken some time to get to know me, he’d know I’m not religious and probably would have held his tongue.

I got offered the job. Naturally, I didn’t take it.

Like others have said, Glassdoor is good to see problem spots in negative reviews. Positive reviews are meaningless in my eyes.

For reference, the bank was called Bank of Internet at the time. They’ve since rebranded to Axos and I continue to recommend against them. I know nothing about their financial credibility, but I can’t in good faith recommend anyone support a company that allows people in positions of power to “debate religion at the water cooler.” That’s a hostile work environment.

> I can’t in good faith recommend anyone support a company that allows people in positions of power to “debate religion at the water cooler.” That’s a hostile work environment.

This is likely some cultural issue (I'm not from the United States), but I don't get what some person of power who loves debating religion at the water cooler makes the company a hostile work environment. Quite the opposite: in my gut feeling the fact that religion (a topic that has a tendency to cause heated discussions) can be discussed at the water cooler is rather a point of evidence that the work environment is really healthy.

Yes, this is the issue I have with all the comments on this thread saying that glassdoor has too many good reviews for a company that the commenter knows is "toxic". I have no idea what "toxic" means to the commenters here. Then I finally see an issue concretely identified: toxic can mean manager expresses an interest in "debating religion at the water cooler"? So what?

I also wouldn't generalize from this poster's anecdote to conclude "This is likely some cultural issue" in the US. I guess religion is a touchy subject in the US compared to more homoegenous nations like in the EU, and a rule of thumb I'd always heard is to avoid it in the office. (They used to say the same thing about politics in the office but that definitely went out the window these last 10 years.)

Religion is a legally protected class in the US, and the fact that a boss would willingly want to discuss, much less debate it with a subordinate opening the business up to much unnecessary liability is a red flag at least for stupid leadership.

This is absolutely crazy to a European.

Really? How would European business culture approach this? I feel like talking about debating religion when it’s not relevant to a potential employee is extremely short sighted or some type of backhanded mind game; it just doesn’t seem normal to say that at a job interview. After a working relationship has been established if it comes up, that is different, but if the VP just says that based on seeing a potential employee’s work with a church, it’s quite suspect.

I'd happily talk religion, trans rights, racism etc with anyone at work.

But then I'm not paranoid , and Ive never worked anyplace in 20 years where I feel people are being dishonest or disingenuous or playing any sort of games. especially not mind games, that's fucking absurd to me that you would even think that at all.

What sort of people are you working for, that sounds like hell.

I've always been in offices, and worked for managers I've gone and got drunk with and talked about all sorts of shit. it's never been an issue.

If US office culture Is as you describe it, it sounds fucking awful.

All those topics sound like minefields I would be cautious discussion even with good friends, and then only if we have similar views. If I knew there would be a significant disagreement I would drop the topic probably, avoids more trouble.

I think it’s about minimizing liability. I wouldn’t want a work dynamic to turn toxic due to a coworker’s prejudice or some disagreement we had debating over the water cooler. At work you focus on work, sure you can have some chit chat but generally these topics are breached after being acquainted with someone.

My favorite thing about glassdoor is that I've had employers use their pay scales for negotiations. Which of course are many years old at this point. Needless to say I rejected their offer.

They also seem to be below what companies offer in reality...

Glassdoor removed all of my reviews after submitting a negative view about 1 company. Previous reviews had been mostly positive or just neutral with provable facts.

Having seen their internal Blind, social Slack channels and culture vs. the Glassdoor reviews, and then submitting my review which really "went against the grain" of Glassdoor, it was clear there was something going on. I just didn't care enough to find out.

As these systems age, I think they're all missing one feature - "what are ratings or reviews from the past 6 months".

Sounds like target.com

I ordered a play kitchen based on reviews and then I found it to be poor quality, I wrote a review which was never published without any reason given

As such, I don't really trust positive reviews anymore, especially, there

I only mostly trust yelp reviews