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Comment by tpoacher | Hacker News Reader

This is actually an amazing opportunity for Glassdoor.

Just put a "badge" next to companies known to sue employees who post reviews on Glassdoor.

No reviews are even needed from that point on to signify a shitty company; for all anyone knows all negative reviews may have been taken down through legal action, but the badge stays, signifying that there was at least one review so damaging that they had to get lawyers involved (or that the company climate is of that toxic kind that sues its own disgruntled employees more generally).

In the end suing will end up acting as the ultimate bad review for that company on the site.

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They already do that.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/ZURU-Reviews-E2286297.htm

> Glassdoor Alert: Employer Legal Action

> This employer has taken legal action against reviewers and/or Glassdoor for the reviews that have appeared on this profile. Please exercise your best judgment when evaluating this employer. Learn more about Glassdoor Alerts.

That's interesting, I didn't know they did that. But it could be better:

1) This alert doesn't show up at all on mobile.

2) IMO this should either affect the overall score or be displayed in search results as well, which is not currently the case: https://www.glassdoor.com/Search/results.htm?keyword=ZURU

Imo its good enough, doing more visible thing or showing them even worse might make them walk on thin line for another lawsuit

I didn't know this either. I stand corrected.

Having said that, apart from what you also flagged, it's also a bit bland. Like "there's some legal stuff here, exercise caution".

Instead the badge could have symbolic character, an emotive icon ... something. Something that strongly implies "Danger Will Robinson" without explicitly saying so. Something any company would want to avoid risking that thing showing next to their logo, unless it was absolutely necessary.

As it is now, all I'm getting is a bland "huh, something legal must have happened here".

But it does give you enough to start doing more searching to understand the greater context, no?

I hear what you're saying, and I think that it would be good to have more clear language, particularly for people new to white-collar employment (which, I imagine, would be a good portion of Glassdoor's audience)(people with more established careers can check Glassdoor AND ask people in their network, whereas people new to the industry may lack/have less of the professional network).

That said, at least here in the US, a carefully-bland legal statement strongly implies what you're looking for. Like, the more bland, the bigger the warning sign :)

I think it should also be below the ZURU logo. Right now it looks like a generic warning for the site (e.g. "Glassdoor goes offline for maintenance in 5 mins")

Shows up on mobile for me

I imagine Glassdoor is reacting to the situation and is going on the "Better to get out part of the solution now than wait to get everything out perfectly" which I would agree with.

Yesterday I accessed the link on mobile and also could not see the warning. I can see it today. Maybe they reacted to your comment?

It's showing on my mobile phone?

And I just checked a company where I know it happened.

No warning.. so no idea why and how they show it..

I see no such alert on Glassdoor's Zuru page. Nor do searches of the web page on "alert" "legal" and "action" lead me to an alert. Like it never happened.

Is this not Glassdoor's Zuru page?

https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-ZURU-EI_IE2286...

If so, it's on there, down in the reviews section

What about a badge for companies who unsuccessfully sued for the info? This would both guard against bad companies who are the genuinely litigious jerks we want to see hurt, and give pause to employees to frivolously libel themselves to attack a company without ground (something that would be clear were the company to successfully sue).

Except where’s the money in that for Glassdoor? Glassdoor makes money from job listings and it’s in their interests to have positive reviews of companies as that’s going to get companies to pay for job listings because they’ll get more/better applicants if they have positive reviews.

"Good"companies will continue having positive reviews.

I'd argue that "bad" companies with predominantly positive reviews, were the negative reviews were all effectively sued away, presumably hurt Glassdoor's model more than they help it, so it's in their best interests to flag "bad" companies using other means.

Also, "good" vs "bad" is an oversimplification. In reality the most likely outcome is that this badge will become another point for companies to game. But if the result of that it acts as a disincentive to suing employees that leave bad reviews, to me that's presumably a good outcome.

The thing is, that companies tend to irrationally chase money, damn the consequences. I used to work for eHarmony and despite consistent user complaints, they continued to run ads for paying users because they made money from that. They didn’t care about the reputation hit or the quality of the experience, just the revenue that the ads generated. I don’t think that eHarmony was particularly unique in that respect. Everything gets A/B tested to maximize revenue and that’s all anyone seems to care about.

The foundation of the site's usefulness is that the ratings have some signal. The value of job listings to a Glassdoor user is that they're from companies that Glassdoor rates as positive: an undifferentiated mass of ratings would be a completely useless site. The idea that they have no incentive to improve discriminativity (at the expense of company rating) proves way too much.

Eg by that logic, Yelp would have no incentive to allow bad reviews. Hell, they could just be a listing site that puts "5 stars (10,000 reviews)" next to every listing.

This is true but there is enormous pressure for these businesses to directionally encourage review scores to trend north. Higher reviewed locations and businesses always garner far higher engagement, and this directly impacts top line. As you point out, there is some ephemeral point at which users might begin distrusting the site en masse, but this inflection point is always easy to ignore as "a problem for another day far in the future." In the mean time, tiny but substantial changes occur all the time which nudge that score higher and higher.

In my experience, that macro trust issue is rarely discussed, even though, at some undefined point in the future, it could pose a serious existential threat.

Sure, I agree there's an incentive force pushing scores up. I was responding to a comment asking what possible countervailing force could push scores towards accuracy. The answer is pretty obvious, as the yelp reductio ad absurdum shows.

They already do that.

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