For our first episode of 2025, Alex and I took a walk down memory lane to revisit our content mill alma mater and read some heinous Glassdoor reviews. We got into the absolutely opaque, arbitrary policies and company hullabaloo that we had to live and breathe during our time there. Notably, what is a “unit”? What about a “standard” unit versus “premium” unit? How many “units” did we have to do per day? And why was there a break room with a foosball table and an N64 that literally no one ever used because we were all too busy trying to meet our quotas?
The thing I noticed almost immediately about the reviews on Glassdoor was the disparity between the reviews for the Content Writer position versus almost every other position. The reviews for other positions ran the gamut from glowingly positive to mildly nonplussed — mostly positive, with some constructive feedback for management about company culture and communication policies. If you only read these reviews, it would seem to be your regular mid-2000’s startup. But the Content Writer reviews . . . Well, the one we quoted from the most extensively in the episode was titled, “Toxic Hellscape,” so you can imagine what the tone was.
This was a fun conversation, not very research heavy, just a shooting-the-shit kind of episode to get us back into the swing of things. And we have more stuff planned for the next couple of episodes, including a return to our book club series. We’ll be reading “The Politics of Bitcoin” by David Golumbia, and maybe a couple other things by him. I’m excited to dive in.
Alright, I’ll get out of the way so you can listen to me gab some more about the content industry and how predatory it is! Enjoy!
Liz Cultivates | L.M. Fern 
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