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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Glassdoor is extortion-as-a-service. They routinely called up two previous places I worked and offered to remove bad reviews if we paid them, which we declined. One of the bad reviews eventually became prominently featured. To be honest it wouldn't surprise me if they wrote the review themselves, that's how scummy I feel this company is.

Totally garbage business model, and if anyone reading this works there I hope you re-evaluate your life's purpose - you only get so many years and using them to help Glassdoor seems really terrible. What an ethically bankrupt piece of worthless trash that place is.

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I don't know, I mean, their rating is pretty good as an employer... https://www.glassdoor.com/glassdoor

4.2 in SF location. So this is very good info. That's the baseline. Below 4.2 => DO NOT CONSIDER.

I know on ebay and amazon I do not buy from sellers under 99.6%, as an absolute minimum.

It's ok for the system to be gamed, as long as one can understand the rules.

The formula for interpreting a rating out of 10 on an Uber service is (rating - 4) * 10.

It has to be very bad to dip below 4, so that 4.x is the only thing you really can look at.

A bit of a tangent, but I feel like I have also created an artificial scale on a rating system myself. I use Untappd to score beers. But it turns out there is a pretty wide variety of beer that I like so most of them end up as 4 +/- 0.5 our of 5.

But I'm not the only one. The overall rating system most beers end up in the 3.5 to 4.5 range. Where 4.5 becomes "oh my god, these brewers are doing incredible things with this beer" and 3.5 becomes "ugh, this tastes worse than bud light"

Ah not far off from the scale used by video game critic site IGN:

“This game is trash” - 8/10

I'm not that strict when it comes to things. I sell a few things here and there on eBay, even a 4 star review would easily pull me below 99.6%.

The eBay ratings - despite being numerically the most egregious - are probably the most helpful. 99.6% ostensibly says that there's a 0.4% chance of you having a bad experience. Star ratings don't really convey any meaning.

I'd definitely adjust my baseline "acceptable percentage" based on what I'm buying. If I'm getting a pack of USB cables for $0.05 each, I'm not going to be too fussy about the rating. I'll take a 2% chance per cable of them not working, that's what I'm paying for. If I'm buying a new GPU, I'm going to be a lot pickier about it.

They are becoming Yelp.

I heard that Yelp lets you pay to have bad reviews sorted towards the bottom. I recently listened to a podcast episode [0], where the CEO claimed that is not true. Would be interested in evidence on either side.

[0] - https://www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918845338/how-i-built-resilie...

Yelp has class action lawsuits filed against them. Scumbags!

This? https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2020/03/yelp-finally-d...

It's even worse than that, Yelp has been accused and proven that they write or have written bad reviews themselves.

Lous Rossmann goes over this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYzK8Nny_Yo

Rossman exploded on Reddit with an Apple device repair rant several years ago, and then leaned super hard into that to keep his views up.

Much like Glassdoor, I find it hard to trust him since it’s clear he has a moneymaker. He’s incentivized to accuse the Big Corps of wrongdoing and he never has to back it up.

He owns a apple repair shop and complains about apple all the time. He just happened to go viral on reddit once (actually a few times). He makes most of his money from his repair business, his sitting-in-a-chair videos (that aren't about apple), and his bike videos are just him talking. I don't really agree with a lot of what he says (esp. about NYC) but I don't think he's being biased in this video.

This issue is complicated by the fact that there's a thriving ecosystem of marketers and scammers who operate around Yelp, and will call and tell you they work for Yelp and can have negative reviews removed and other things. So people really are getting these calls, it's just that it's a scam.

Isn't this just extortion and racketeering with extra steps.

"Hey I have this magic problem I created for you, now you have to pay me to fix it or your business will dry up."

I think you missed that it's third parties offering to perform these services. They target Yelp because it's one of the more prominent review sites, but I've gotten calls from people claiming to be able to manipulate Google reviews as well.

I could write a similar story to one about Glassdoor on Yelp -- they banned me from leaving a review because I had professional experience in the same field. Even though I wasn't actively in the field and offered to prove through a number of pieces of documentation, they considered it to be "attacking competitors".

Per this, that means they only allow non-professional reviews on their platform. So if one professional sees flaws/someone getting duped, they're helpless to point it out.

Surely, at least in some countries (hypothetically, IANAL), at that point the act of removing negative reviews for money means that they themselves have editorial status and, consequentially, negative reviews are a form of libel?

So basically it has become a 'protection' scam.

The jobs industry is incredibly scummy. Everyone comes in thinking, 'Wow, I'm going to help people get into a job they'll love!'.

You leave because you get tired of pushing Uber jobs on everyone because they have unlimited budget to spend to attract job seekers.

It seems to me that the bad reviews were published on the site regardless of their offer. So I can't see how is this extortion.

Extortion would be along the lines of "we publish some made up bad reviews unless you pay".

> offered to remove bad reviews if we paid them

Yes. You are right. That is not extortion.

It's still extortion.

Nope

In my opinion, the important takeaway is that their actions completely undermine the integrity of the service they are claiming to provide.

Whatever you'd like to call it, it's scummy behavior and they deserve to lose any market share they've gained by misleading users about their service.

Calling something extortion which is a legal term and punishable by federal law is different from accusing them undermining integrity of the service. And yeah, it's scummy.

Extortion is a weird crime if you think about it.

You ask people for money to not do something that's in itself legal.

It's a topic ripe for tortured moral philosophy :)

People here for some reason think that throwing around legal terms based on gut feelings is somehow the start of civil discussion. And I tend to correct those people. That's all. Extortion is a legal term and it's pretty well defined compared to other crimes. And this is not extortion. I can recommend all commenters who downvoted to go and denounce the offence of extortion and see for themselves what happens. I for one would love to see it to have a good laugh :D

> Extortion is a legal term

It also has a definition that 99% of the people you are communicating with, who are not lawyers, are more familiar with:

the practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats.

You're sperging out about the wrong thing to the wrong people.

> extort - (transitive) To take or seize off an unwilling person by physical force, menace, duress, torture, or any undue or illegal exercise of power or ingenuity.

This is taking money from an unwilling person by duress, using an undue exercise of power (ie control of bad reviews on their platform).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/extort

Duress? LOL. What duress? If they pay, the situation gets better. If they don't pay the situation remains the same. Your claim is ridiculous. In any case the situation never gets worse so there is no duress.

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