[TheAngush]

I had an experience like this today when I tried to use GlassDoor for the first time. As a student making my first ever job applications, I wanted to see what salaries and work environments were like at particular employers.

GlassDoor did the same scroll-locking tactic (so an element zapper like Ublock Origin's wouldn't resolve the issue), instructing me to register or sign in to view any information. So I registered an account. Only, it still covered the screen and locked the scroll position, now telling me that I needed to leave a review for my current employer if I wanted to use the website for information gathering.

I find this particularly egregious, particularly for a company ostensibly founded around the notion of transparency and freedom of information (in regards to workplace compensation and culture). Evidently one is only entitled to make informed decisions after first experiencing the potential consequences of making uninformed decisions. Joyous.

Suffice to say I will not be using GlassDoor in the future.

[stickfigure]

> I needed to leave a review for my current employer

Perhaps you'd like to join as a disgruntled GlassDoor employee?

[wak90]

I believe glass door removes negative ratings

[LanceH]

You have to pay up first, right?

[TeMPOraL]

Right, but it's not you, but your HR department. Which is also exactly the reason it's a bad idea to write anything about your current employer.

[93po]

Also Glassdoor has revealed who posted reviews (including IP addresses) to employers when pressured to do so.

[flerovium]

Can you cite a source?

[ProtoAES256]

For a circumvention method, I suggest using the following script

javascript:var r="html,body{overflow:auto !important;}"; var s=document.createElement("style"); s.type="text/css"; s.appendChild(document.createTextNode(r)); document.body.appendChild(s); void 0;

I bookmarked the script and click it whenever uBo blocks the site popup but not enabling the scroll. It works most of the time in my quite long usage.

Though I agree that we have a bigger problem than the scrolling on hand.

[efreak]

This can be automated with stylish (or fork) or tampermonkey. I've used to run a userscript on every page to prevent it from intercepting ESC, thanks to squarespace making ESC navigate you away from the current page to the site login. Thankfully the site I used to visit is no longer hosted by squarespace and they seem to have gotten it together to stop intercepting it elsewhere.

[ProtoAES256]

This script sometimes break the normal flow of interactive type pages, so I don't think it is that applicable to all pages. Great thinking though!

[bovermyer]

You've experienced why Glassdoor is the opposite of useful. Ironically, I think this is actually the opposite of what Glassdoor was originally meant to achieve, and I still think the original creators had the best of intentions.

I think it's interesting that despite thousands of years of existence, we as a species still can't do better at "quickly and accurately evaluate how well you'd match an employer/group" than "do you know someone at the group that honestly says it's good."

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Dev tools, look at the html and body element, and uncheck overflow:hidden. Plus a strategic delete or two on the DOM tree.

[EdwardDiego]

They're getting sneaky about where the overflow:hidden is applied these days, and one site I encountered had JS that polled that attribute and reapplied it if it was modified.

I was impressed at their commitment to dickery.

[efreak]

    Array.from(document.body.querySelectorAll('html,body, body > *, body > * > *')).forEach(e=>e.style.overflow='default!important') 

Adjust number of levels as necessary. Adjust overrides as necessary. Array.from is probably overkill, but allows for more advanced queries like `e.parentNode.textContent.trim().toLowerCase().indexOf('sponsored')==0`

[DelightOne]

Why can't UBlock Origin do that?

[lyvxh]

It can, using CSS injection: example.com##body:style(overflow: auto !important)

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

That's kinda nice... trying to figure out if it needs to even be per-site or not... locking overflow's almost always gotta be hinky, doesn't it?

Anyway, just wanted to say thanks.

[lyvxh]

If you want to make it work for all sites, you need to turn on allowGenericProceduralFilters in the advanced settings.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I dunno. Maybe it can, and I'm just too dumb to configure it right?

[EdwardDiego]

Just do what everyone else does, say you work at Google and you're leaving because the quality of the free t-shirts is declining.

I think they removed my review, but they still let me in afterwards.

[mcv]

I've got a few different ways to handle these nag sites, but the annoying part is that I need to remember each separate approach for each site.

For example, for the daily beast, I set the debugger to pause on subtree changes. They remove the article from the dom when you scroll, and the debugger stops that before that happens.

Other sites I just remove the modal popup from the dom and disable the class that prevents scrolling. Some sites I open in archive.is.

What I want is a browser that remembers all these fixes for me and applies them automatically.

[5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV]

Just disable JS

[1270018080]

Glassdoor is comically broken. It didn't even work with Firefox for months. You can't log in, sometimes you get stuck in a cloudflare authentication loop, random info tabs on company pages crash. It's so bad I don't even know if they have people working there, like they aren't aware of how non-functioning the website is.

It's slightly better on Chrome but some of the above issues still persist.

[bryanrasmussen]

>It didn't even work with Firefox for months

the conclusion would be that us devoted FF users are all happy employees. Considering usage stats I'd say that tracks.

[sshine]

Your expectation was that this information was free, and you got offended when you realised they trade in information and you have to pay with giving some back?

This is not a dark pattern any more than giving a company like GlassDoor this information is a dark deed.

[brookst]

The dark pattern is not mentioning this requirement and instead position account creation as the only friction to see data, and then springing the new requirement after.

Honesty would mean telling the user upfront that the info they are looking for will be available after the set up an account and leave a review of their current employer.

[TeMPOraL]

Beyond not disclosing the requirement up front being a clear dark pattern, I'd think this is self-defeating. The only time I need Glassdoor is when I'm contemplating changing jobs. Leaving a review for my current employer feels extremely risky, as the no. 1 type of users of Glassdoor are HR departments.

[sshine]

Yes, such a review can’t easily be honest.

When I looked up an employer I’d joined recently, I gave a review as someone who had just started. Their most recent negative review was quite negative and easily traceable to the person who had most recently quit and was on their last days.

So reviews are either dishonest or not anonymous when they have to be recent; this pattern appears to incentivise some degree of pollution or self-incrimination.

The review I gave before leaving was much more informed and honest, in part because I timed it and in part because there were several people with my profile leaving at the same time.

[TheAngush]

You've overlooked a key element of my complaint: I'm a student. I have never been employed in any capacity. Thus, I have no information with which to trade.

But whether it's a dark pattern is not what makes this particular instance egregious in my mind. I find it egregious as it places me in a situation where I have to either lie by providing false information and misusing the platform, or make an uninformed decision I may not otherwise have made to consequences that could potentially have been avoided were the decision in fact informed.

Consider a workplace culture rife with harassment. That's a harmful situation to enter. Reading reviews of an employers workplace culture on a platform like GlassDoor isn't going to make it impossible to encounter such environments, but it will make it easier to avoid them. But I'm forbidden from doing so because I cannot trade for it. As I indicated in my original comment, the implication here is that I'm only entitled to seek safe work environments if I can afford to pay for the privilege.

Per their own About page:

> Every day, we’re inspired by a vision to make positive workplace change through radical transparency. Through the products we make and the communities we create, we’re breaking down barriers that lead to discrimination, pay gaps, and toxic work environments.

This tactic of demanding upfront payment (in the form of a review) is antithetical to their stated goal and philosophy. As a user I think my other complaints are fair, but my offense, as you say, comes from this.

[actinium226]

Try levels.fyi

[godelski]

I was about to say that levels blocks too but as long as you hit the "I've shared my salary" twice they let you through. Which I find acceptable since they depend so much on that a little friction is okay.

[xwdv]

> Suffice to say I will not be using GlassDoor in the future

You’ll cave eventually, they know this.

[recursive]

How can you be so sure? I've never used it in my life, and I don't even have a particular motivation not to.

[cyanydeez]

This dark pattern is meant to generate useful data

[DJHenk]

> You’ll cave eventually, they know this.

I caved in years ago and registered. Only to find out that the site was still horribly broken and it was impossible to get any information out of it. Truly a 'Fuck You' pattern.

[acover]

Caving into lying? That just pollutes their database.

[xwdv]

It’s fairly trivial to detect bad data, especially when you know what good data looks like. And once you’re in, they can still get useful data even if you lied.

[acover]

That's surprising. How do you trivially detect bad data? (Beyond extreme examples like below minimum wage)

Even when you know the true distribution (in which case why ask for more data) you can only remove outliers. But outliers exist.

There are techniques for when someone enters many numbers but I don't know any for 1 number.

[flangola7]

For one, how carefully did the user input information into fields. If you're making it up, it will be much faster and less hesitant than a legitimate entry.

That and a hundred other data points help create a ML model that reliability identifies illegitimate activity.

[acover]

Cool! That actually exists, more or less: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-20462-6

[jowdones]

Sadly "giving up" on using "their" services is inconvenient to you a lot more than it's hurting them.

Sure you can refuse to use Facebook and Glassdoor and Amazon and Google account authentication, but then you might as well grow a beard, puton some rags and go live in the woods as a hermit. World doesn't change coze some guy decides to stop talking showers because the water company is an abusing asshole.

The correct response is not to flee from them but fuck them back. I have a throwaway Google account that I use for this purpose. Glassdoor wanted me to register an account? Sure! Review my employer? You bet! I worked as a Principal Engineering Architect at Google making 1.5 million base plus bonus.

There's no requirement to provide the pay stub so I can and will dream up something. And I get the feeling that most figures I see reported by these sites are just that: delirious.

[EA-3167]

> Sure you can refuse to use Facebook and Glassdoor and Amazon and Google account authentication, but then you might as well grow a beard, puton some rags and go live in the woods as a hermit.

This is a bizarrely extreme form of black and white thinking, and not one I understand. Most of what we do in life isn't about changing the world, it's about managing our experience of it.

Few people are deluded enough or so engaged with self-love that they think their ideas and behavior are world-changing.

[salawat]

>Few people are deluded enough or so engaged with self-love that they think their ideas and behavior are world-changing.

...And everyone walking around with an attitude like that is exactly why the world is as shitty as it is. The world is the sum of all of us. Think better of yourself and your time, and do everything you can to make life harder for those that would try to sell you on cheapening it, and you just might make the world a better place for everyone.

[EA-3167]

That's a remarkably moralistic and simplistic view that ignores the realities and mechanics of large-scale power. Simply LARPing as though we're world-changing with our banal existence isn't helpful, it's pure self-indulgence.

Unless you're very wealthy, very violent, or very committed to a cause (often to the point of entering politics or raising/moving money) your individual contribution is negligible.

[Mizoguchi]

Individual contributions may be negligible at a large scale in the short term but they have the potential for global impact if you give them enough time, not talking about a few years but generations.

An uneducated mechanic and his wife decide to give an unwanted child a home, dad builds a workbench for his son and teaches him how to use tools to break, fix and build things, inadvertently setting in motion the beginning of Apple.

Sure, there were other events Jobs parents had absolutely no control over, like those that led Bill Fernandez to the same school as Jobs.

But it is undeniable that without Paul and Clara Jobs adopting Steve there would be no Apple and the world would look completely different today.

So through our small, individual contributions we can definitely nudge the world to follow a particular direction, and if enough people do it, it is expected that once in a while one of us actually ends up changing the world.

[Yujf]

You don't have to change the world, but if no one tries to change things that are bad, they will not change.

So don't have a defeatist attitude all the time, but once in a while try to actually have an impact. We will all be much better for it.

[EA-3167]

There's a difference between being defeatist and going around thinking that your malicious compliance is somehow fixing broken things.

[bheadmaster]

There is power in avoiding services when many people do it.