Hah! I had this idea in the car the other day ("like ratemyprofessor, but for landlords") -- the big issue I got hung up on is authenticity. How does this tool ensure that reviewers are actually tenants, and not landlords trying to boost their rating?
upload proof of address with your name on it when creating the account, like a bank statement or electricity bill.
The only way for the landlord to cheat it is to set up fake accounts with companies and get statements sent to them. Probably possible but a lot of work for 1 review
These days those are mostly electronic, it's not hard to edit the text in a PDF to make it show a different address. Not something an average person can easily do, but trivial for a motivated attacker to pull off with a bit of money or the right friends.
Also, if it has your name on it then it's no longer anonymous.
Photoshop seems like a straightforward way around this method of verification. It works for the DMV here in the States, but perhaps only because lying in that context carries legal penalties.
And how would the service verify the statements? Why would it take a fake account? It's not that hard to get a sample statement and modify it to seem real. If you could get confirmation from a bank or utility that might be enough to prevent forgeries, but what incentive would there be for them and why would they want to share private information?
I worked for a while at a company that everyone hated, and there was an ongoing war on Glassdoor between the narcissistic CEO and the employees. Every new employee (and there were a lot of those because turnover was high) left negative reviews, and periodically the CEO would get on with a bunch of sockpuppet accounts and leave positive reviews. It was a small enough company that we knew they couldn't be real (they claimed roles that were all accounted for, and they'd all show up over a day or two with the same writing style), but Glassdoor has basically no verification and never responded to our reports. The only action their moderators ever took was to remove our reviews if we tried to call out the inauthentic ones.
I think someone tried that; the issue lies with reviewers that really "spill the tea" (fellow kids, am I using that right?); specifically that Glassdoor can be legally compelled to unmask the reviewer.
> How does this tool ensure that reviewers are actually tenants, and not landlords trying to boost their rating?
I have only ever felt the need to tell other people about my landlord when they were really terrible. I had a landlord that I liked once, but “getting to hang out with a cool dog sometimes” wouldn’t have compelled me to seek out and contribute to a review website.
I would simply treat anything on the site that’s even slightly more effusive than “I have had little to no reason to interact with my landlord” as patent garbage.
This is how I pretty much treat all reviews these days. There is relatively little incentive to lie in a negative review (a competitor could try to trash on you, but I've yet to see that become a big problem and it would be potentially actionable), but there are lots of reasons why someone would want to manufacture positive reviews. So I typically just read through the negatives these days and see if there's a common theme.
How about this scheme: a service that provides a hash of your {SSN, DOB, domain of a web site}, which allows anyone to cryptographically check that the domain is part of the hash, but not SSN or DOB, and which is required to create an account. This guarantees that any physical person can create one and only one account on that web site and also preserves anonymity.
I would have loved to have had something like this when I was living in New Zealand, which is notorious for slumlords and rentals which are literal health hazards. Every time someone has proposed something like this for New Zealand on the NZ subreddit there are questions around legality (although some of it might just be fear mongering). How does it work out in the US? Are you planning to take info for properties worldwide?
Two decades ago we moved to new Zealand and the apartment my mom had rented (sight unseen since we were moving from the us) was unlivable with bugs and garbage literring the house. Can confirm that new Zealand has this problem
Always visit before renting, to see it but also to hear it (in particular traffic noise level).
(Book a cheap hotel if you need for the first weeks. Make sure your belongings arrive by the slow route (e.g. by sea) and are re-routable when you know your definitive address.)
Sites like these have been popping up everywhere through the years. Why not simply use Yelp or Google? What are the moderation and verification challenges? What about legal/defamation issues? How would one trust each review?
Yelp and Google are not reliable--no review website I've seen really is. For instance, Makras Real Estate in San Francisco is a horrible property management company (i.e. slumlord) where the owner was even concvicted of crimes: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/jury-convicts-san-franc... but only after the news of this became public did the ratings on those site show Makras Real Estate as anything less than a 4/5 star company and most of the one sentence reviews were from accounts with generic profile pictures and only a handful of other reviews--they were clearly faked. I reported it multiple times and nothing ever happened. Facebook even responded saying the accounts looked legit and still shows Makras as having 4.9/5.0--what a joke!
I don't think any of them would be unless they verified an ID to make sure each account was actually unique--but currently none of them have any incentives to limit their user count. Users = growth! So they just turn a blind eye to it.
My landlord isn't a company or a management agency, but the guy who owns the house I live in. Google and Yelp probably aren't great venues for reviewing him, except in the "infamy" sense.
You're right, there are quite a few similar platforms out there. However, a website specifically dedicated to reviewing landlords could offer more targeted and relevant information for tenants than more general sites like Yelp or Google. Besides, a little competition never hurt anyone, right?
As for moderation and verification, these are indeed important challenges. But with the right combination of community-driven moderation and automated systems, it's possible to create a trustworthy environment. Legal and defamation issues can be addressed through clear guidelines and by fostering a culture of constructive criticism.
Of course, blindly trusting every review isn't recommended. The key is to use these platforms as a tool, not the ultimate authority. By looking for patterns and corroborating information, tenants can make more informed decisions. It's about empowering people with information, not providing a definitive verdict.
Send people a postcard to verify their address. If they lived there recently, they probably set up forwarding - so USPS would forward the postcard to their new address, and they could still verify themselves as being a tenant during the past 12 months.
I agree with the concept and we definitely need this. The issue, generally speaking, is that there isn't much of a business model.
> I agree with the concept and we definitely need this. The issue, generally speaking, is that there isn't much of a business model.
This is similar to one of the anti-businesses I have long considered, except I would like to perform actual, invasive background checks on landlords. A couple others:
- A service for employees to drug-test their employers.
- A neighborhood watch app to report suspected police activity in your community.
I think a business model that mirrors a brokerage could work.
Brokers are essentially a pure middleman with very little added value outside of connecting the owner with the tenant, so the audience here is definitely worth something.
> I would like to perform actual, invasive background checks on landlords.
Why would a landlord sign up for that though? A rating system or history is one thing, but what additional value would a tenant have in a landlord who passes these "invasive background checks"?
> - A service for employees to drug-test their employers.
What's the goal there? What are the incentives? Why would employers sign up to it and why would employees especially care? The system doesn't have your real or perceived injustices because there are a few evil fat-cat employers and landlords who just need to be shown the error of their ways and/or publicly shamed about their hypocrisy and driven off. It just happens as a consequence of the incentives involved.
> - A neighborhood watch app to report suspected police activity in your community.
What would be the goal? Every neighborhood group I've seen significantly features discussions about crimes and police activity. As far as I can see the most use people get out of them is being alerted to speed traps.
I don't know, people can have a genuine desire to improve things. I wasn't trying to call that out, just wondering what they expected might come of these ideas.
How is an employer or landlord an "authority"? Having the same standards for employers and landlords as they have for employees and tenants sounds like a great idea. We'd get rid of many hostile anti-employee and tenant practices quickly.
Employers and landlords are authorities in that they legally have rights to something a person needs: housing and income/healthcare. A landlord or employer can choose to withhold those things(maybe with some extra steps like an eviction, or a layoff, but still).
>what additional value would a tenant have in a landlord who passes these "invasive background checks"?
the question is more what disincentive would a prospective tenant have leading them to not sign up with a landlord who fails the background check. I also can't imagine there would be a system where the landlord is required to sign up.
It's hilarious that people think this is absurd and not the extremely generous compromise that it actually is. In history the penalty for being a landlord was often a sharp blade or hot lead.
I am surprised that there isn't a market for more invasive checks on a lot of things, from potential dates (especially from women) to landlords to employees in sensitive positions.
I wouldn't trust anything that background checks potential dates.
I've met folks that decide their exes are "theirs" - my sister's ex harassed her and her now husband for some years, for example. (He's still not an upstanding person, just has less harassment. They have a child together, so no getting away).
Some folks are abusive. There is no real catch for that. Some of the abusers won't do it until living together or married: Understandably, not all victims want to talk to random services about their experience. And worse yet, the date in question might not have that many exes, so they are going to know it is you.
Similar things can happen with mental illness: It might have made the relationship rocky and contributed to the end, but you also might have enough compassion to not really want to talk about this. After all, perhaps they'd do better without the baggage of your past relationship and might have found a combination of medicines/care that works for them. (I have this: I hate my ex, but I don't actually wish them suffering)
We end up with vague information on-par with a 5-point system, one that folks aren't willing to answer in some circumstances.
The whole reason that employers can make you drug test or landlord can make you submit to background checks etc is that there is a power imbalance. The idea of make them do the annoying thing is great, but without the power imbalance in your favor how do you force that?
Why does there need to be a business model? Can't people contribute to society for its own sake? Comments like this are implicitly hostile to that idea, and that is "The Issue" with our society, generally speaking.
Aside from server costs and dev costs (which do have to be paid by someone), a postcard-based authentication method means the platform would be spending about $0.48 per review. That has to be paid for somehow.
Make it an even $1 and that pays for probably all the costs of that program assuming they don't want to turn it into a big business. It probably won't need full time dev work.
You're not wrong (but I dispute the fairy tale characterization you attributed to my comment).
Everyone's life priorities and capabilities are different. Occasionally over the years I have had enough disposable income and free time to work on a passion project. Since the latest inflation wave that has gone away sadly, but before that I was able to commit a few hundred a month.
Eventually, one did get a large amount of traffic, and a handful of volunteers forming a team. While it wasn't something I could monetize, it did contribute to successful job interviews, and a temp gig working for someone who was a user of the project and gave me priority over other candidates due to seen first-hand that I was fixing things when they needed to be fixed.
Keeping the costs low can be done, some are better than others at it. Low-cost IT infrastructure still exists, even in this economy. You should go into such a project expecting to not outgrow your cheap infrastructure unless you are in fact turning it into a business. Otherwise it is wasted effort (and money).
I'm with you that it's possible for some, just like the money drain "Blue Origin" is possible for JB.
But hardly everyone can afford to lose money like that.
Besides, it's not really possible to keep the costs low if you take into account the opportunity costs involved. Therefore it's not rational to expect that from others however I agree that it would be nice if those who can would just do.
If glassdoor can’t protect the anonymity of its reviewers, this can’t either. There will be legal allegations of libel that will lead to one’s identity being revealed by court order or otherwise.
I also find these sites largely useless for research as only the people with extremely strong sentiment would go out of their way to add a review, meaning almost any management company with a large number of tenants will end up with bad ratings, as some portion of those tenants almost definitely will have a negative perception of the management and that portion will be overrepresented in the tally.
Truth doesn't matter in the US court system, unless both sides are equally well funded. Given that one party owns capital and the other rents, I'd say that seems not too likely.
Real estate you rent out is probably the prime example of Capital, and many who own real estate (without a mortgage on it) certainly aren't working class.
I didn't find a great source on this, but the average landlord in the US seems to own 3 properties. [1]
English courts are notable for requiring the defendant to prove what they said was true. It is common practice for the world’s rich and infamous to take a trip to London whenever they want to chill their critics’ speech:
I'm not sure exactly how I feel about English libel law, I think a bit too strict but wouldn't want to lose it all - but surely libel tourism just shouldn't be allowed? Is it just too hard to stop without blocking legitimate claims too?
edit: I read the rest of that Wikipedia article, seems a decade ago something was done to at least reduce it -
"On January 1st, 2014 the Defamation Act 2013 came into force, requiring plaintiffs who bring actions in the courts of England and Wales alleging libel by defendants who do not live in Europe to demonstrate that the court is the most appropriate place to bring the action. Serious harm to an individual's reputation or serious financial harm to a corporation must also be proven. Good faith belief that a disclosure was in the public interest was made a defense."
Why would one suing for slander need to that whatever slanderer invented he didn't do ?
That puts unreasonable level of burden on one being slandered (i.e. the victim) and would allow one doing the slander just make up stuff that is very hard to prove that the victim didn't do.
Yes. It's like a pseudo-union. Collectively bad companies are avoided and good ones receive more interest. Low salaries and bad managers are put on display. Good ones are, too.
It's useful for the job seeker, and it's useful for society.
You're saying it is corruptible. But it doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. There's plenty of critical reviews on the platform. More than enough to take a peek into the problems some corps have before joining.
No. I've looked up companies that were great or awful, and the reviews looked about the same. A fee negative reviews from the janitor, and lots of positive reviews that look like they were written by the PR team.
OP is concerned about demasking via the court system. Even if the company has no desire to "win" a case, they can compel Glassdoor (or anyone else) to give up the identity of a user. Even if Glassdoor can't figure out who you are, then they'd have to put up a fight to defend you. If they choose not to and to just remove the review with cause instead, then the price of removal is the attorneys time.
No, but see the consequence: the information is removed if the user or the company fail to defend it. That makes it a vector for people who have a lot of money they can waste.
Which is a flaw in the US court system - "winning" a civil case may not award you the attorneys fees, so it paradoxically makes it easier to just accept instead of fight, if you're against somebody rich.
It would be trivial to just link the words of the review to the individual. You write something like "My screen door broke and the landlord refused to fix it" and the landlord can just remember or check who mentioned a screen door. It's not like a job where they have hundreds or thousands of other employees who could have written it.
Two factors matter in these scenarios: identifying the reviewer and proving it.
Employees can maintain anonymity by avoiding specific work anecdotes ("My manager A did B"), using ChatGPT for rephrasing, and delaying their review (a few months after the experience).
Employers must prove the reviewer's identity for legal remedy, but Glassdoor may issue damning alerts about employers who do so. Even then, using Tor and temporary emails with fake names offers protection to the employee.
By making it difficult to both figure out who wrote the review and prove it, I think employees are safe posting their genuine exp online.
I also believe it's totally morally fine if the reviews are accurate. It may break the ToS of Glassdoor to use a fake name, for example, but an authentic peek into what's going on in corps benefits both society and Glassdoor itself.
I get where you're coming from, but no system is perfect, right? While anonymity concerns and skewed reviews might be valid points, that doesn't mean we should dismiss the whole idea. Instead, we could work on refining the system to minimize these issues, like implementing measures to protect anonymity and encouraging a more balanced representation of reviews.
Remember, sites like this are just one piece of the puzzle when making decisions. Sure, they might not be perfect, but they can provide useful insights when taken with a grain of salt. And who knows? Maybe this website could inspire a new wave of accountability and transparency in the landlord-tenant relationship, which seems like a win to me.
Ratemyprofessor was very accurate in my experience, even more so if you're good at reading between the lines of critical comments. Knowing that positive reviews generally comes from the class being easier or negative reviews comes from stricter teaching is still useful, and hardly a severe negative imo. You just need to read what the reviews say (and don't say) and adjust accordingly.
We had something administered through my university called FAQs (Faculty Assessment Questionnaire?) that were published for students and would tell you how much time a class would take per week, etc that ended up being more useful overall. Does every university have these?
If your data isn't going to be exhaustive or unbiased samples you could at least show the omission rate. E.g. "there were 100 tenants in period X, 1 left a review".
Also, the common people has awful taste, and is terrible at understanding a situation from another point of view.
This is why trip advisor is so useless, at least in France.
Between the vocal unhappy outliers and the happy idiots that think those french fries coming out of the freezer were delicious, the noise/signal ratio is abysmal.
When I lived in Colorado Springs, my ex and I started only going to 2-star places for this reason, _especially_ if the biggest complaint was “bad service” or the restaurant “looked dirty”. Found a lot of great, minority-owned hole-in-the-walls this way. In a town where Panera Bread is 5-star to the white suburbanites, you gotta assume other places are the good ones.
The only barrier to defamation is an hCaptcha. Not a good idea.
> What do I do if I receive a dishonest review?
> Landlords who believe they have received a dishonest review can report the review and include their email in the report form. We will contact you directly to address the issue.
It's the Yelp model. Landlords will pay to get negative reviews taken off if they think it's affecting their business... you know, when a time comes where there'll be plentiful rental property to choose from /s
After looking at this site for a bit, I have a hunch that it was created by landlords. The quotes were designed to push a false narrative. Humans don’t talk like that.
I don’t expect to agree on one notion of fairness, but I want to know how the service will behave.
There are a range of good and bad actions on both sides. Services all have some implied/stated/actual policies and ethics (or lack thereof). How exactly are tenants treated fairly? Landlords?
So far what I see are unstated policies, opaqueness around moderation and curation, and a lack of organizational and structural reputation and accountability.
We need to pay more attention to human nature and models of trust before launching and using a product. You don’t pivot to find a model of ethics and trust; is should be the foundation.
Ah, yes, the classic 'human nature' argument, as if our current system of landlord-tenant relationships is the epitome of ethical behavior. At least this platform attempts to level the playing field by giving tenants a voice. Sure, it may not be perfect, but let's not pretend that the status quo is a shining example of trust and ethics. Instead of criticizing the very idea, maybe we could focus on improving the platform and establishing those foundational values you speak of. Or, you know, we could just continue to trust our benevolent landlord overlords without question.
> Ah, yes, the classic 'human nature' argument, as if our current system of landlord-tenant relationships is the epitome of ethical behavior.
Hold on; I didn’t say that. I don’t think that landlord tenant relationships are fairly balanced in most jurisdictions.
It seems you assumed incorrectly about me. If you got my intentions wrong, how do you know you got the intentions of the website correct? Why do you assume that the website is trustworthy? (Do you?) What gives you confidence that it will put in place reasonable moderation standards?
Please, let’s try to remain calm and use logic here.
> Instead of criticizing the very idea, maybe we could focus on improving the platform and establishing those foundational values you speak of. Or, you know, we could just continue to trust our benevolent landlord overlords without question.
A false dichotomy.
You don’t know me. I’ve rented in many jurisdictions. I likely share many of your values.
This is not primarily a technological problem. One key to solving this problem well is setting up the organizational structure reasonably. What legal structures are in place? Whose personal reputations are on the line? What track record do we have to go on?
Some may think these organizational things can be done later. I disagree. They should be designed before any product is launched. They are foundational.
> Instead of criticizing the very idea, maybe we could focus on improving the platform and establishing those foundational values you speak of.
Criticism is essential.
To paraphrase a wise person I know: sometimes the most beneficial thing we can do is not support ill-conceived projects. We can make our own assessment.
I read https://ratethelandlord.org/about. It is vague. What are their policies? Who controls moderation? Why should we trust them to carry out their claimed mission?
There are two sides to every story. And a disgruntled tenant is, not infrequently, a really awful neighbor. Landlords often can't proceed to eviction until a tenant has been really recalcitrant, a huge pain, or doing patently illegal stuff and bringing the wrath of the State down on the property. Tenants often have nothing better to do than snipe and feud at either their neighbors or the landlord, and the worst disputes are the one that take place close to home.
I'm really blessed that I have a good, ethical landlord now, and even my neighbors give so little to complain about, so I just get by, and it's always smart not to stick your neck out, lest it get chopped.
They'll be like hotel ratings. A bunch of 1 star reviews complaining the breakfast buffet closed at 10am and they wouldn't extend the hours for them personally.
Maybe the verification process is not perfect, but there is very little you can do if you have a bad landlord. In fact, you are at their complete mercy because you need them to give a good reference to your next landlord.
Great job to whoever made this. I encourage you to keep going at it and improving it until it becomes an indispensable consumer tool. Can't wait for the time where landlords have to explain themselves.
Probably useless because until say 50%+ of all the landlords in your area are rated, the chances are the place you want doesn't have a rating. Requiring a rating would hamper your research. What we need of course is better protection for tenants in general.
I take it that the data currently in there for my city is 'demonstration' data. There is very low correspondence between the 'star rating' system (all 5s in every category for all landlords) and what the 'written review' is saying.
I've rented in many locales over a long time. How much power the landlords have is pretty much up to local statutes. Some cities make them give you a copy of the landlord-tenant laws. In some cities, for example, if they don't make timely repairs, they may be forced to pay for your move. If they 'visit' your place without 48 hours notice (except in emergency) they've broken the law.
Adding this tenant-impowering information to a site like this would make it much more valuable.
I don’t think this will work, for the many reasons other comments have laid out, but I hope something can be done.
The power imbalance between landlords and tenants is outrageous. Tenant legal rights are rarely respected. Agencies basically ignore the needs of tenants. I cannot think of another product category where the buyer is treated so poorly - and for a service costing 1000s of dollars!
Clearly the current incentive structures are not working.
I think this varies dramatically state to state. Perversely my experience has been that strong tenants’ rights are highly correlated with high hurdles to renting
For example it can be a long drawn out process to evict someone in NYC for non payment of rent, and super easy in TX. Which means landlords in Texas run a credit check and take first and last months deposit and you’re in business because if you don’t pay, you’re gone shortly thereafter. In NYC you need to provide bank accounts, tax returns, have co-signers etc. because if you end up not paying it could be a long drawn out struggle to get you out and they don’t want to take that risk. Which leads to my comment that perversely the bar to renting becomes higher where there are more tenants rights
Anything that increase the hassle/cost of dealing with an actual bad actor will raise the barriers to entry.
If a company can fire someone they just hired for basically no reason at all via a layoff, they'll be much more willing to expand quickly and be less thorough in screening applicants.
If once they hire someone, they cannot fire them for 40 years without an actual honest-to-goodness crime prosecuted; they'll be more cautious about hiring.
There are genuinely bad tenants. There are genuinely bad landlords. The system does a poor job of filtering the two. If the system worked well, good participants from either group would have little to fear from doing business with a bad actor on the other side. The system we have-and that you described well-forces a policy choice between favoring landlords (including the bad ones) or favoring tenants (including the bad ones). It is not a fair and free market.
it's kind of a trade off. i've definitely found it to be a pain in the ass to rent in places with strong tenant's rights.
On the other hand, I've also lived in a town with very weak tenant's rights. When the heater broke one winter, the landlord's solution was to give me 6-8 space heaters and tell me to leave them on 24/7. Since these technically kept the temperature above 68 degrees, he had no legal obligation to do anything more.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 474 ms ] threadThe only way for the landlord to cheat it is to set up fake accounts with companies and get statements sent to them. Probably possible but a lot of work for 1 review
Also, if it has your name on it then it's no longer anonymous.
I have only ever felt the need to tell other people about my landlord when they were really terrible. I had a landlord that I liked once, but “getting to hang out with a cool dog sometimes” wouldn’t have compelled me to seek out and contribute to a review website.
I would simply treat anything on the site that’s even slightly more effusive than “I have had little to no reason to interact with my landlord” as patent garbage.
https://ratethispad.com/
I've pretty much never promoted it so it's quite empty, but feel free to pop over.
(Book a cheap hotel if you need for the first weeks. Make sure your belongings arrive by the slow route (e.g. by sea) and are re-routable when you know your definitive address.)
The problems are:
* Is the review accurate
* Is the reviewer someone who has similar standards as I
* Is the review looking at aspects I rate
* Does the reviewer have a bias (good/bad)
* Was the review based on a representative sample
It's the same for job references, service reviews, product reviews. It's almost random.
In the U.S., Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects the operator of the website.
My landlord isn't a company or a management agency, but the guy who owns the house I live in. Google and Yelp probably aren't great venues for reviewing him, except in the "infamy" sense.
As for moderation and verification, these are indeed important challenges. But with the right combination of community-driven moderation and automated systems, it's possible to create a trustworthy environment. Legal and defamation issues can be addressed through clear guidelines and by fostering a culture of constructive criticism.
Of course, blindly trusting every review isn't recommended. The key is to use these platforms as a tool, not the ultimate authority. By looking for patterns and corroborating information, tenants can make more informed decisions. It's about empowering people with information, not providing a definitive verdict.
I agree with the concept and we definitely need this. The issue, generally speaking, is that there isn't much of a business model.
This is similar to one of the anti-businesses I have long considered, except I would like to perform actual, invasive background checks on landlords. A couple others:
- A service for employees to drug-test their employers.
- A neighborhood watch app to report suspected police activity in your community.
Brokers are essentially a pure middleman with very little added value outside of connecting the owner with the tenant, so the audience here is definitely worth something.
Why would a landlord sign up for that though? A rating system or history is one thing, but what additional value would a tenant have in a landlord who passes these "invasive background checks"?
> - A service for employees to drug-test their employers.
What's the goal there? What are the incentives? Why would employers sign up to it and why would employees especially care? The system doesn't have your real or perceived injustices because there are a few evil fat-cat employers and landlords who just need to be shown the error of their ways and/or publicly shamed about their hypocrisy and driven off. It just happens as a consequence of the incentives involved.
> - A neighborhood watch app to report suspected police activity in your community.
What would be the goal? Every neighborhood group I've seen significantly features discussions about crimes and police activity. As far as I can see the most use people get out of them is being alerted to speed traps.
the question is more what disincentive would a prospective tenant have leading them to not sign up with a landlord who fails the background check. I also can't imagine there would be a system where the landlord is required to sign up.
(￣(ｴ)￣)ﾉ
I've met folks that decide their exes are "theirs" - my sister's ex harassed her and her now husband for some years, for example. (He's still not an upstanding person, just has less harassment. They have a child together, so no getting away).
Some folks are abusive. There is no real catch for that. Some of the abusers won't do it until living together or married: Understandably, not all victims want to talk to random services about their experience. And worse yet, the date in question might not have that many exes, so they are going to know it is you.
Similar things can happen with mental illness: It might have made the relationship rocky and contributed to the end, but you also might have enough compassion to not really want to talk about this. After all, perhaps they'd do better without the baggage of your past relationship and might have found a combination of medicines/care that works for them. (I have this: I hate my ex, but I don't actually wish them suffering)
We end up with vague information on-par with a 5-point system, one that folks aren't willing to answer in some circumstances.
Not OP, but 0.48 is the price to mail a postcard.
It would have to be run by a very dedicated volunteer with deep pockets.
Things just cost money: Be it electricity, housing, food, hosting, opportunity cost, whatever.
If you want something to be sustainable there needs to be a plan for covering the costs involved.
Life is not a fairy tale.
Everyone's life priorities and capabilities are different. Occasionally over the years I have had enough disposable income and free time to work on a passion project. Since the latest inflation wave that has gone away sadly, but before that I was able to commit a few hundred a month.
Eventually, one did get a large amount of traffic, and a handful of volunteers forming a team. While it wasn't something I could monetize, it did contribute to successful job interviews, and a temp gig working for someone who was a user of the project and gave me priority over other candidates due to seen first-hand that I was fixing things when they needed to be fixed.
Keeping the costs low can be done, some are better than others at it. Low-cost IT infrastructure still exists, even in this economy. You should go into such a project expecting to not outgrow your cheap infrastructure unless you are in fact turning it into a business. Otherwise it is wasted effort (and money).
But hardly everyone can afford to lose money like that.
Besides, it's not really possible to keep the costs low if you take into account the opportunity costs involved. Therefore it's not rational to expect that from others however I agree that it would be nice if those who can would just do.
The zip code dropdown is broken, at least on mobile safari. Would like an input with type="number" rather than a drop down.
I also find these sites largely useless for research as only the people with extremely strong sentiment would go out of their way to add a review, meaning almost any management company with a large number of tenants will end up with bad ratings, as some portion of those tenants almost definitely will have a negative perception of the management and that portion will be overrepresented in the tally.
Unless it‘s a large landlord, chances are that the renter is more liquid.
I didn't find a great source on this, but the average landlord in the US seems to own 3 properties. [1]
[1]: https://www.mysmartmove.com/SmartMove/blog/todays-landlord-c...
English courts are notable for requiring the defendant to prove what they said was true. It is common practice for the world’s rich and infamous to take a trip to London whenever they want to chill their critics’ speech:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libel_tourism
edit: I read the rest of that Wikipedia article, seems a decade ago something was done to at least reduce it -
"On January 1st, 2014 the Defamation Act 2013 came into force, requiring plaintiffs who bring actions in the courts of England and Wales alleging libel by defendants who do not live in Europe to demonstrate that the court is the most appropriate place to bring the action. Serious harm to an individual's reputation or serious financial harm to a corporation must also be proven. Good faith belief that a disclosure was in the public interest was made a defense."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case
That puts unreasonable level of burden on one being slandered (i.e. the victim) and would allow one doing the slander just make up stuff that is very hard to prove that the victim didn't do.
It's useful for the job seeker, and it's useful for society.
You could even have the web browser do like a mini Tor protocol where your IP is tunneled through others currently logged in.
Employees can maintain anonymity by avoiding specific work anecdotes ("My manager A did B"), using ChatGPT for rephrasing, and delaying their review (a few months after the experience).
Employers must prove the reviewer's identity for legal remedy, but Glassdoor may issue damning alerts about employers who do so. Even then, using Tor and temporary emails with fake names offers protection to the employee.
By making it difficult to both figure out who wrote the review and prove it, I think employees are safe posting their genuine exp online.
I also believe it's totally morally fine if the reviews are accurate. It may break the ToS of Glassdoor to use a fake name, for example, but an authentic peek into what's going on in corps benefits both society and Glassdoor itself.
Glassdoor has a way of dealing with this that is more damning than a bad review.
Remember, sites like this are just one piece of the puzzle when making decisions. Sure, they might not be perfect, but they can provide useful insights when taken with a grain of salt. And who knows? Maybe this website could inspire a new wave of accountability and transparency in the landlord-tenant relationship, which seems like a win to me.
But I understand the way it was designed (unverified students, double ratings, correlation of positive reviews to ease of the class...) did it in.
It boils down to how well thought through the implementation is, and how well it is iterated upon.
Same with yelp.com
It's still there and being used.
If your data isn't going to be exhaustive or unbiased samples you could at least show the omission rate. E.g. "there were 100 tenants in period X, 1 left a review".
This is why trip advisor is so useless, at least in France.
Between the vocal unhappy outliers and the happy idiots that think those french fries coming out of the freezer were delicious, the noise/signal ratio is abysmal.
> What do I do if I receive a dishonest review?
> Landlords who believe they have received a dishonest review can report the review and include their email in the report form. We will contact you directly to address the issue.
Good luck addressing issues you can’t verify.
There are a range of good and bad actions on both sides. Services all have some implied/stated/actual policies and ethics (or lack thereof). How exactly are tenants treated fairly? Landlords?
So far what I see are unstated policies, opaqueness around moderation and curation, and a lack of organizational and structural reputation and accountability.
We need to pay more attention to human nature and models of trust before launching and using a product. You don’t pivot to find a model of ethics and trust; is should be the foundation.
Hold on; I didn’t say that. I don’t think that landlord tenant relationships are fairly balanced in most jurisdictions.
It seems you assumed incorrectly about me. If you got my intentions wrong, how do you know you got the intentions of the website correct? Why do you assume that the website is trustworthy? (Do you?) What gives you confidence that it will put in place reasonable moderation standards?
Please, let’s try to remain calm and use logic here.
No one is assuming that.
A false dichotomy.
You don’t know me. I’ve rented in many jurisdictions. I likely share many of your values.
This is not primarily a technological problem. One key to solving this problem well is setting up the organizational structure reasonably. What legal structures are in place? Whose personal reputations are on the line? What track record do we have to go on?
Some may think these organizational things can be done later. I disagree. They should be designed before any product is launched. They are foundational.
Criticism is essential.
To paraphrase a wise person I know: sometimes the most beneficial thing we can do is not support ill-conceived projects. We can make our own assessment.
And the judges too.
1) gdpr/avg. You can't record data in Europe about a landlord or an address without permission.
2) landlords are not people that you want to annoy. Especially the bad ones.
The only people who provide reviews will be people who are unhappy. And you'll only get their side.
I'm really blessed that I have a good, ethical landlord now, and even my neighbors give so little to complain about, so I just get by, and it's always smart not to stick your neck out, lest it get chopped.
Great job to whoever made this. I encourage you to keep going at it and improving it until it becomes an indispensable consumer tool. Can't wait for the time where landlords have to explain themselves.
I'm also seeing:
Review contents not matching star ratings, in both directions (landlord is a compulsive liar, respect: 5 stars!)
Repeats that appear to be the same disgruntled tenant posting multiple times
Landlords could also be behind some of the positive reviews. It's hard to tell.
I've rented in many locales over a long time. How much power the landlords have is pretty much up to local statutes. Some cities make them give you a copy of the landlord-tenant laws. In some cities, for example, if they don't make timely repairs, they may be forced to pay for your move. If they 'visit' your place without 48 hours notice (except in emergency) they've broken the law.
Adding this tenant-impowering information to a site like this would make it much more valuable.
The power imbalance between landlords and tenants is outrageous. Tenant legal rights are rarely respected. Agencies basically ignore the needs of tenants. I cannot think of another product category where the buyer is treated so poorly - and for a service costing 1000s of dollars!
Clearly the current incentive structures are not working.
If we’re talking about the US, health insurance and time shares must be worse, no?
If a company can fire someone they just hired for basically no reason at all via a layoff, they'll be much more willing to expand quickly and be less thorough in screening applicants.
If once they hire someone, they cannot fire them for 40 years without an actual honest-to-goodness crime prosecuted; they'll be more cautious about hiring.
On the other hand, I've also lived in a town with very weak tenant's rights. When the heater broke one winter, the landlord's solution was to give me 6-8 space heaters and tell me to leave them on 24/7. Since these technically kept the temperature above 68 degrees, he had no legal obligation to do anything more.