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.
