Is there any service that actually is fair? When Ubisoft makes Forbe's "Best Places to Work" I don't feel like I can trust anything to make an objective measure other than organic word of mouth and simply experiencing it for myself.
1. Be a nobody company
2. Utilize generous user content to build up an important knowledge-base/economy
3. People begin to trust the information in the system and come to rely on it
4. Sell-out entirely and make a lot of money letting people buy influence
5. People abandon the site realizing it has no signal anymore
(Digg, Reddit, Amazon, Glassdoor, experts-exchange, facebook, google search ~ish)
Notable exceptions: Craigslist, HN, stackoverflow, wikipedia, youtube
In terms of your notable exception, I'd say Indiehackers (now owned by Stripe) is still quite good. But perhaps that's because Stripe appears to be pretty hands-off at this point, and of course that could change.
If you're not planning on selling your personal projects, then they're hobby projects.
Once a hobby project no longer becomes a hobby project, it becomes a commercial endeavour.
HN gives off almost a courteous Victorian gentlemen's club vibe it seems to me. Blatant astroturfers are given the silent treatment or shown the door.
If the average customer believes that a lot of positive reviews means the quality of the product is high, they are more likely to buy the product. As long as the product is a least decent, they will probably be happy with it. If they are unhappy, they can complain and Amazon will refund them to make them happy (this is probably rare so not a huge impact on profit). Amazon gets to keep lots of the margin on the lower quality knock-off items, instead of the original IP owners. If the item really sucks and they get a lot of returns, Amazon can then use that as a signal to bury it.
If Amazon produced millions of fake reviews themselves, it would be a huge scandal. But if thousands intrepid sellers invest in making thousands of fake reviews, it’s not as much of a scandal for them. Amazon makes a show of fighting the most obvious fake reviews, so people will continue trusting the platform. But are they really using their top talent to fight the fake reviews? I work on a ML / data analysis team and I feel like we could do a much better job at that task than Amazon seems to be doing, and they ought to have more resources than we do.
I’m not accusing Amazon of doing this strategy intentionally, but perhaps there is an understanding that the ROI of engineering talent spent fighting fake reviews and counterfeit items is low or negative.
Would you agree with this idea: the companies that keep trust figure out a business incentive that aligns with keeping it?
for example - HackerNews wants the best content to attract smart people to apply to YCombinator, which is where they make money - Wikipedia is a nonprofit, relying on happy users and foundations to donate - Craigslist is effectively a Public Benefit Corporation; They have a noncorporate noncommercial ethos as a closely held entity, and choose not to profit maximize
What do you think Glassdoor should do to align their business with having accurate and trusted reviews?
These sites like Glassdoor, Yelp, etc.... there's no context.
This is basically accurate. Everyone has bias so you can only trust someone if you're partially aware of which way their bias sways. Companies will always push for their employees to rate them high for PR contests. A lot of them don't even apply weight for company size, so generally the largest companies with the most complicit employees will win.