[read]

This tangent might sound mean but I often wished there was some glassdoor-like site or startup for shaming bad behavior, especially lying. Starting with rental agents.

If you stuck to reporting facts, how would that put you in danger?

[tmuir]

To some extent, Yelp and similar sites fill this role. There are a couple of problems with this.

1. It's fairly simple to post a fake review.

2. Yelp has been accused of what amounts to blackmail by offering to hide bad reviews if businesses buy advertising on Yelp.

3. It's not rocket science to see how 1 & 2 could team up

4. There is no objective standard for a good or bad review, so how do you accurately quantify the aggregate? If the restaurant was out of the dish the reviewer wanted because it was a half hour before closing on a busy night, that one star review carries the same weight as someone who legitimately had terrible service, cold food, and got food poisoning.

This amounts to Yelp being nothing more than the yellow pages, in my opinion. I don't see how this would change for other services.

[andrewfong]

(1) is mostly solved by valuing long, well written reviews over star ratings and allowing users to upvote / downvote. You can also allow up voting / down voting of user-posted reviews to create a reputational penalty for non-useful reviews.

(4) is addressed by volume. That's easier for something like restaurants than apartments or recruiters though.

[walterbell]

Why hasn't anyone sued glassdoor?

[enraged_camel]

Glassdoor heavily cooperates with companies to take down reviews that are too negative or specific.

Also, anyone can post reviews, which the companies take advantage of. We had an HR person at my previous company whose job responsibilities included posting one positive (4-5 star) review of the company per week on Glassdoor and similar sites. As you can imagine, doing so is a much cheaper way of dealing with negative reviews than suing the websites.

[walterbell]

Good to know, thanks for the insight.