- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- france@jlai.lu
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- france@jlai.lu
That’s a fantastically efficient way to destroy their business. There’s no way to get honest reviews of employers from employees who know their identities will be exposed whether they consent or not. Doesn’t even matter if the review is after leaving that job, future employers can go nosing too.
Absolute techbro-brane gold.
This is what happens right before the major money holders abandon ship. There’s no way they don’t know this is business-suicide. I bet they got a big payday from some companies that paid Glassdoor to shoot itself in the face!
Yep, we’ve seen this happen over and over before
Imagine if a fediverse version of Glassdoor would appear after this
Maybe a start would be a forum for employer reviews
i don’t really see a point in federating employment reviews, but there certainly needs to be a non profit providing such a service
I’m normally not a conspiracy dude, but this just fucking SCREAMS sabotage to me.
This screams liability and damages avoidance to me.
Good way to get yourself blackballed from the industry if you give a bad complaint from previous employer.
A former employer actually did send lawyers after me for a bad Glassdoor review. The dumb thing is that it wasn’t even my review.
This is beyond stupid.
Welcome to the point of the change. Kill off the liabilty & associated damages.
Doesnt matter if the facts are true. In fact it matters more if they are!
I expect their logic is their review “curation” racket is a sideshow and the real money is selling information to agencies and sales companies.
I just went in and manually edited my display name to my previous asshole of a boss. Two can play this game. If they want to get rid of anonymous content, then let them deal with poisoned content.
😂 Awesome
Oh shit, that’s good.
This is the way
I put a review up for my previous employer a while back. My whole profile uses fake data. Even in my review, since it would be very obvious who I was, I was light on details and generalized as much as I could and used false dates for when I was hired/left.
This screams liability protection, your name change is both logged so they can transfer liability to you.
Reputation slander and damages can get astronomical
No one can afford a lawsuit that hacky.
Uh, reminder that these giant corporations don’t shop for lawyers like you or I would have to, they’re already on retainer. It would literally cost them nothing they’re not already paying to sue someone (except their reputation, which they’ve already thrown away).
Right, but you’re not talking about Glass Door. You’re talking about another cooperation reacting to information on Glass Door. Most companies in the US are small businesses without the resources to go after people on websites in general, and if you’re obfuscated your identity before posting on glassdoor, then you just double to tripled the price of the lawsuit in lawyer time filing motions to uncover your identity.
You’re talking about another cooperation reacting to information on Glass Door.
by wanting to take legal action. They want to transfer liability from Glass Door to the individual. So yes, my point stands…
Glassdoor “may update your Profile with information we obtain from third parties”
Imagine Reddit does this next lmao one day you open up and all your real life social media are linked to your u/Lick_My_Fuckhole profile, your coworkers see you as “people you may know” on their profiles. Neat
Didn’t Google+ do that?
It’s been so long since that debacle I honestly don’t remember.
YouTube did it when Google bought them and changed everyone’s unique username to their Google account (real) name
wtf that’s a terrible decision lol

Looks like they prodded but didn’t unilaterally force.
Worse, StarCraft tried it lol. Major blizzard fuckup
Facebook did it as well, maybe a couple years after opening up to the non university crowd. Neither FB at the time or G+ years later gave any thought that their no pseudonym policies put someone’s safety at risk.
Google+ was a Facebook-like social media. It was only ever supposed to be real names, so no issue.
I mainly use reddit now for porn. Maybe a good way to get into a freak fetish ring…
The only fetish subreddit I followed was banned. There was not even any nudity.
Fuck Reddit.
Oh wow, that’s dangerous.
Yikes
This is one of the most obvious potential cases of purposeful sabatoge. They were probably bribed by other big businesses to destroy their reputation so people would stop using the site.
There’s nothing businesses hate more than their workers having negotiating power, and wage transparency gives them more power than they had before. There’s a reason why it’s considered “rude” in the US to discuss wages with co-workers; I always make a point to discuss my wage with all of my co-workers, since it’s illegal for businesses to prevent that discussion.
In most other countries, it’s the norm to openly discuss your wages; unions are also more common in other countries. It’s just standard toxic workplace cultures trying to prevent people from getting paid what they’re worth, or god forbid, forming a union.
In what countries is it custom to openly discuss salary? In Germany and most if not all countries I’ve been to professionally it is not the norm. This is of course bad for transparency/employees and good for employers.
Where I live we don’t really discuss salaries and I think that mostly comes down to society being tricked into believing it’s a bad thing. However our national statistics agency has made salary statistics public, which means anyone easily check their salary range and see if they’re being underpaid. I actually prefer that to discussing with co-workers because you end up getting a much better picture of your industry.
In my country I’m only aware of statistics published by a newspaper (source may be statista, some agency or a job portal). I find the values weird however as I earn way above the stated value for my general description. I’m in a bit of a niche however so that might work to my benefit. The statistics still feel like ‘expectation management’ to me though.
All of scandinavia. There are public registers where you can look up the salary of everyone for norway, sweden and finland. When these registers were introduced, the salaries were normalized across the whole population
In Denmark, I’m part of a union which publishes salary stats for every possible job title, management responsibility, education, in a fairly convoluted matrix. Still, this allows me to easily negotiate with companies and see how well they pay. There might be something organised by the government, but I’ve never had a need for it.
Germany has a principle of equal treatment. The only way to ensure this is respected is to discuss wages. There is a legal precedent that makes it completely unambiguous that discussing wages is protected. It may be uncomfortable, but that’s just social pressure, encouraged by companies.
In China, “How much do you make?” Is right up there with “What’s your name?”.
Pretty disarming for unsuspecting foreigners.
Pretty disarming for unsuspecting foreigners.
That would indeed be a WTF moment for me.
There is also the growing difficulty of disseminating real information from false information, but that should have been more the reviewed company’s problem than Glassdoor.
While I see what you are seeing, I think people will just move to the next startup.
Also by Occam’s razor, don’t explain with malice what you can explain with stupidity
Fair point, but I’m wondering which part you were applying Occam’s razor to - what Glassdoor did is clearly malicious!
To the part that they were bribed.
I think they are simply in the pipe dream that they will become the new LinkedIn
That would be Hanlons razor. I have no idea whether it applies here.
Hanlon’s razor.
From the article that they acquired a professional social networking app so their intention is clearly to be like LinkedIn - real names, links, career history, “social”. They want to monetize that information to sell to recruiters and salesmen.
So basically they’re nakedly greedy and they continue to suck. I thought LinkedIn was awful but Glassdoor is a whole new level of awful.
Or
Think about it for more than 1 second.
They’ve been sued for liable.
Or
They’re being shit and creating a new revenue stream because constant growth and bonuses
Do you know when it became illegal to ban salary discussions in the US? All the companies I have worked for recently have mentioned it not being allowed at some point.
You cannot prevent your employees from discussing wages. It is literally illegal to do so, and you cannot reprimand people for doing so.
Under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or the Act), employees have the right to communicate with their coworkers about their wages, as well as with labor organizations, worker centers, the media, and the public. Wages are a vital term and condition of employment, and discussions of wages are often preliminary to organizing or other actions for mutual aid or protection.
If you are an employee covered by the Act, you may discuss wages in face-to-face conversations, over the phone, and in written messages. Policies that specifically prohibit the discussion of wages are unlawful as are policies that chill employees from discussing their wages.
You may have discussions about wages when not at work, when you are on break, and even during work if employees are permitted to have other non-work conversations. You have these rights whether or not you are represented by a union.
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-rights/your-rights-to-discuss-wages
Highly recommend at least trying to poison your data before deactivating/deleting; they have some legalese that gives them a workaround to keep things to an extent
Note: When you close your account, you will no longer have full access to salaries, reviews, or interviews. Any content you have shared will be removed from the display on the site, but we reserve the right to keep any information in a closed account in our archives that we deem necessary to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. For more information, review our Privacy & Cookie Policy.
True, but keep in mind they likely have backups of everything. If you do this all at once it will probably be noticed and they might just roll it all back when you are gone. Case in point, reddit. If you do this slowly maybe it will stay, not sure.
Even if they know, burnt out software engineers with other priorities are probably not recovering old data
Unless some exec has a meltdown and demands them to revert the site
I doubt they delete anything. Just add a flag to the datastore so users don’t see it, but they can still sell it or train AI on it or whatever.
You also need to be careful when deleting your account - when you do, they’ll send you a “there was an issue with your request” email that tries to get you to register again by prompting you to “log in” to fix it. The log in is creating a password for a new account.
Really? Wild
I’ve never seen much reason to use a real name on Glassdoor. They demand visitors sign up to see information, and every logon it demands more details. So I am glad I used a throwaway account and I expect many others did too, or filled it in with junk. I hope their database is poisoned with garbage. I’m sure they will continue to turn the screws - using a mobile device? You MUST use our app etc. I hope people realise that LinkedIn already sucks and here is something even worse moving into the same space.
Thanks, deleted my account
Deleted my account and then made up a fictional worker with AI who works at Glassdoor in their Albuquerque location making $5mil/year as an intern and bitching about how the pay isn’t great.
Same. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Everyone thinking this was a business blunder… People got paid a lot of money to kill this site. It served in its own small way, to give workers a bit of power in relation to employers and that was unacceptable.
Yeah, this reeks of generic neoliberal sabotage to me. They do the same thing with unions and political parties. If anything is a potential threat to profits, it’s infiltrated and undermined.
There’s simply no way that a team focused on employee rights does something like this. Everybody working there would definitely be aware that companies routinely try to identify and punish people for their posts. That alone would end any non-malicious plans for using real names.
What possible reason could Glassdoor have invented to convince themselves this is a good idea?
Would you believe a social network?
Yes, companies will use that to justify anything
Bribery
Shit for brains manglement.
Are there any good alternatives to Glassdoor? The website and app were already hot UX garbage as it is so difficult to find salaries in other countries and figure out the currency without it bugging out frequently.
There is Blind (I think by Team Blind).
Blind is full of the shittiest coworkers you didn’t know you had, so take it with a grain of salt
I’ve heard good things about levels.
Levels is great for the tech industry. (Possibly other industries as well, but that’s the one I am familiar with)
Only tech, and only programmer-adjacent roles.
If you’re the guy who serves food at a tech campus facility it does nothing for you
I just went in and manually edited my display name to my previous asshole of a boss. Two can play this game. If they want to get rid of anonymous content, then let them deal with poisoned content.
Team Blind is decent, at least in the tech sector.
You quoted the wrong/other comment
What a breathtakingly stupid decision. Can’t wait to see how it pans out for them.
By Lemmy standards I’m perversely unconcerned with my privacy. But I just updated all my glassdoor info to wildly incorrect stuff (name, location, industry, job title, etc) then deleted it. Even for me this is a bridge too far.
Mike Hawk, CEO of Nunya
This is the best summary I could come up with:
(Ars will only refer to Monica by her first name so that she can speak freely about her experience using Glassdoor to review employers.)
Although it’s common for many online users to link services at sign-up to Facebook or Gmail accounts to verify identity and streamline logins, for years, Glassdoor has notably allowed users to sign up for its service anonymously.
The EFF regularly defends Glassdoor users from being unmasked by retaliating employers.
She decided to go through with a data erasure request, which Glassdoor estimated could take up to 30 days.
In the meantime, her name remained on her profile, where it wasn’t publicly available to employers but it could be used to link her to job reviews if Glassdoor introduced a bug in an update or data was ever breached, she feared.
“No one has the ability to see your user profile and the contents within it, meaning no one, including your employer, will be able to see your details,” Glassdoor’s employee wrote.
The original article contains 586 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Can confirm, they populated my data through a data broker at some point.
I guess the GOOD NEWS is the employer reviews are still anonymous.

Me too. Only I have an additional 22 tabs open lol

How’d you delete your account? I don’t see anything other than the option to deactivate mine.
Yeah, the deactivation link takes you to “delete” it, but they do have some legalese that suggests they could keep it to “enforce their agreements” among other things

Account deleted. I’d love to see the exodus data trends from this decision.
I just deleted mine too.
All I have in mine is my email address. The rest is made up garbage
seems like they have legal work around . fuck them honestly.
Remember when YouTube had a use full real name policy? Arguing it would improve comment quality and would stop harassment etc. Yeah, didn’t quite work out at all and thankfully they let the policy fizzle.
Also Blizzard “real ID” lol
























