It did start that way but they had forums where we could talk about all the shenanigans going on without being censored. AFAIK this is not really the same on GlassDoor as they censor comments or at least I've seen multiple people stating their posts were censored.

Perfect username to reply to this btw

But it was not really a business, that's what I meant. It was done for fun, and so that Pud could make a name for himself.

And later write a book!

My username: thanks. I was a great fan of Pud.

I even wrote the Italian 'version' of F'd Companies https://www.dotcoma.it/book

That totally makes sense. Being just a forum and just for fun is less of a legal target I think, at least back then. That's cool you wrote a book about it, I had no idea.

Nowadays probably the only way to do this without censorship or taking bribes to promote or censor would be on a .onion site I think and it would probably get DDoS'd into oblivion.

One way is to play ball with the candidates. A big casualty of the job search is the candidate because they deplete their savings while looking for a job. Companies on the other hand can afford to not spend the money on a hire, or delay hiring, or put job postings that aren't really hiring to keep up pretenses or feel they're not losing anything. The candidate doesn't have a concentrated force to counteract this.

If candidates wised up it could get interesting. A web app that is the other half of LinkedIn could be there waiting to be discovered.

It's one force, not "the" force. As described in the other comment, having enough data about which employers are actually hiring could go a long way.