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Bro, we need Glassdoor for renting...
I'll build it, just as soon as you figure out how it gets paid for.
Get paid by landlords to remove negative reviews, like yelp. Offer to show all reviews, even removed ones, to renters that pay for the premium service.
Ew, I feel gross after coming up with that idea.
It's a lovely pattern to look out for, your efforts to show just how ugly it is, are welcome.
For anyone considering implementing this: No.
shake down bad landlords to delete bad reviews.
charge landlords for priority in search results.
sell searcher info as marketing data.
sell search trends as financial early indicators to hedge funds.
expand to HOA reviews for neighborhoods.
Real estate advertising, surely?
Yeah. No.
"Advertise your rental property on the page where your tenants review you."
Most retailer websites have customer reviews on them?
They could also promote houses for sale (not rent).
I think it works.
"I mean... If you really value your brand, you'll stand behind it? I can put you on the opt-out list though, so future tenants know you don't stand behind it. I'm offering value at a fraction of the cost of advertisement and you're paying for peace of mind."
Nonprofit ... crowd funded... build it and all you need afterward are paying for servers. Then you're just doing donations like Wikipedia. How much would would it cost to maintain such servers? Seems fundable by a wealthy liberal.
And then a wealthy slumlord does the math and finds out it's cheaper to pay people to sabotage the website than to lose tenants due to reviews.
You know somehow wikipedia maintains it's integrity pretty well.
Wikipedia has two significant advantages:
- The content is objective, and sources should be cited.
- Individual editors are volunteers with actual interest in their topics.
The former makes for a clear and low-effort bar for determining if a contribution is bad. If it's not cited, or it's biased, revert and move on. Figuring out if a user-written review is paid for, factually false, or exaggerated is a lot harder.
As for the latter... aside from doing it out of spite or as a favor to landlord friends, I have a hard time imagining that many people would volunteer their time moderating the review page about the apartment they rented 14 years ago.
Well, I don't think the content is objective. There are many politically contentious articles and they have systems, disclaimers, and discussions to try to deal with it.
I think the moderators would be locals looking over an entire neighborhood, sort of like our Lemmy mods.
Just an FYI. Wikipedia is actually privately funded at this point. They don't need donations anymore. From what I have seen of their financial statements, the donations are essentially building a slush fund for them, at this point, and have been for the last few years.
Yeah that's kinda what I meant by the wealthy liberal thing. Make something good enough and you only need a couple good donors.
For apartment complexes there's yelp/Google maps reviews.
I just left a building with 4.5 stars on Google that was an absolute horrific nightmare. Somehow they had gamed the system so that all the recent very negative reviews got mostly taken down or hidden. Do NOT trust Google reviews if you have any inkling the place is sketchy. (I did but the reviews and price were good)
Those are shit though, on average. Only the very upset respond. You're going to have to figure out a way to make the satisfied show up.
Something like this?