Update: Addressing new level system questions and feedback

[emmaki]

4 minutes ago, donnovan86 said:

Generally you get the best profit and results by having your own website. And clearly since there's no control over how these platform evolves, that's the best thing to do anyway. I am sure after these changes, a lot of people will/should consider creating their own website to sell their services.

That's me right now. It's coming along swimmingly. It'll be even better once I've mastered NLP and semantic SEO. 

Which I won't be selling on Fiverr because I'm not down with 30-day review periods for an industry which can't guarantee results that fast. A review period which is specifically there to combat the awful sellers on the platform - such as sellers who insist they don't use AI at all then give tips on how to evade AI detection minutes later - without actually manually dealing with them. 

I can always be reviewed on Google. Sadly, Google is not as advanced as Fiverr when it comes to state-of-the-art tech so I'll just have to put up with the fact they only do stars. How medieval. 

[visualstudios]

1 minute ago, emmaki said:

And, ooh, just 4 days before their next big breathless PR blitz for the investors' stuff. I'd be rather worried about my investment if I peeped into the forum and saw 

I have 100 shares of it, should I start selling call options?

[emmaki]

Idk, everything I learned about investing was on Wolf of Wall Street. And that other movie where Christian Bale did the intelligent superthinker thing during the 2008 crisis, although I spent most of that movie going ???? and not understanding anything. Which probably means it was a good movie, amirite?

[visualstudios]

 

Edited February 18 by visualstudios

[leannelrivers]

2 minutes ago, donnovan86 said:

Generally you get the best profit and results by having your own website. And clearly since there's no control over how these platform evolves, that's the best thing to do anyway. I am sure after these changes, a lot of people will/should consider creating their own website to sell their services.

I updated my socials and got a new website up and running last year after my sales plummeted. And as I began to realise that my (very nice) success manager had run out of things to tell me beyond 'create more gigs'. And after the anticlimactic Fiverr Business, which was supposed to connect us with high-quality business clients. It turned out that every Tom, Dick or Harry qualified for a business badge and could still try to haggle us down like fruit & veg sellers at the Saturday market. And after the release of the new Pro thing, whatever that was. There was also the time I was asked to be an official mentor for up-and-coming freelancers on the platform, but I couldn't charge more than $15 for my mentoring service because it would 'scare people off'. So I charged peanuts, and Fiverr took 20%, oh yes. But still, I told myself that I was doing a good thing and I was a valued member of the Fiverr family (barf). And now there is this update, which is throwing a ton of fantastic professionals under the bus. I'm OK for now, success score of 9, TRS and Pro status. But if that were to somehow change, which, let's face it, may well do considering the new smiley face review system, I'll be under the bus too. I'll still do my best here for now. Just last month, I secured my highest-paid single gig since I joined the platform, but the days of losing sleep over reviews and metrics are over for me. Platforms need freelancers, let's not forget that. 

[visualstudios]

23 minutes ago, leannelrivers said:

There was also the time I was asked to be an official mentor for up-and-coming freelancers on the platform, but I couldn't charge more than $15 for my mentoring service because it would 'scare people off

Oof, I applied to that recently, and didn't hear back. Probably they didn't like my hourly rate.

[leannelrivers]

Just now, visualstudios said:

Oof, I applied to that recently, and didn't hear back. Probably they didn't like my hourly rate.

I did it before the recent application for trainers, so I was pretty sceptical when I got that latest email about it. I did apply to do it again, but put a minimum of $120 per hour. I didn't hear back. 

[vibronx]

23 minutes ago, leannelrivers said:

There was also the time I was asked to be an official mentor for up-and-coming freelancers on the platform, but I couldn't charge more than $15 for my mentoring service because it would 'scare people off'.

Wow, I didn’t know about that. $15? That’s insane. It would cost thousands of dollars to properly train the people who really need a service like that.

[leannelrivers]

6 minutes ago, vibronx said:

That’s insane. It would cost thousands of dollars to properly train the people who really need a service like that.

Yep. I had to make it an official gig, and it had three tiers ranging from $5-$15. And that wasn't just for one hour. When I coached Heineken staff, I charged thousands. It's not the same thing, but still. The final take home on $5 is just about enough to buy a packet of instant ramen noodles in Germany. 

[visualstudios]

15 minutes ago, vibronx said:

It would cost thousands of dollars to properly train the people who really need a service like that.

It depends on how much "training" is needed, but I think I could provide quite a lot of value in an hour. Go over a lot of the details you need to know to make things work around here (that mostly means knowing how the system can screw you and how to avoid it). I'd say an hour with me would be much more valuable for most sellers that need that than an hour with most success managers, so easily worth at least the price of a month of seller plus premium.

We obviously can't compare this to consulting for big companies, it's not only about the value but the target market. This market can't afford it.

Edited February 18 by visualstudios

[filipdevaere]

I see here many times @Kesha. Where is kesha?

[msw_77]

Suggestion: 

Probably fiverr needs to hold a meeting of all the Customer Support Staff, Success Managers, community leaders and the forum staff. 

At least they need to know exactly what's going on.

Everyone has another explanation about the success score. 

You message customer support one time they say order cancellation is not linked to cancelled orders and we can't do anything about you stong bad impact for 1 cancelled order which was reverted by support.
After again reinquiring another guy came and accept that it is a bug and the devleopers are fixing this.

Now why the first customer suppoprt agent closed the ticket saying it is what it is and we can't do anything about it.

 
Nobody knows what is going on with flagged accounts. 

Nobody has an answer to any of the questions

Edited February 18 by msw_77

[charlsmcfarlane]

Just now, msw_77 said:

Suggestion: 

Probably fiverr needs to hold a meeting of all the Customer Support Staff, Success Managers, community leaders and the forum staff. 

At least they need to know exactly what's going on.

Everyone has another explanation about the success score. 

Nobody knows what is going on with flagged accounts. 

Nobody has an answer to any of the questions

This is a good idea. However, I think getting everyone on the same page is an essential first step. Not the only step that Fiverr need to take here. They need to be able to answer everyone's questions, and fix what is broken. Empathy and clarity are the beginning of fixing this. Not the end.

[emmaki]

38 minutes ago, leannelrivers said:

It turned out that every Tom, Dick or Harry qualified for a business badge and could still try to haggle us down like fruit & veg sellers at the Saturday market. And after the release of the new Pro thing, whatever that was. There was also the time I was asked to be an official mentor for up-and-coming freelancers on the platform, but I couldn't charge more than $15 for my mentoring service because it would 'scare people off'.

Oh lord, is $15 really the max you can charge? No thank you!  I used to do this sort of "mentorship" gig years ago (although I basically wrote the gig description as well). But $15? Wow, that's going to attract no-hopers with high expectations. I thought it looked suspicious when I noticed the only people talking about having been successfully invited to it were people who... well, I'm not the target market. 

That gig does have my all-time favorite "bad review" though: 

I put the price up every time someone didn't appreciate my service for that gig 🙂 I think it ended up in the $150 range! 

Fiverr Business is Fiverr Pro btw. That whole thing was just putting lipstick on the proverbial pig. I found it a very poor rebrand due to the utter laziness of renaming everything. Is everything going to be "product release" now? Gee, dial up the creativity a little Fiverr.

[emmaki]

7 minutes ago, filipdevaere said:

I see here many times @Kesha. Where is kesha?

To be fair, it's the weekend and I believe she's in America. This isn't her mistake! Let her enjoy her weekend before she has to put up with us lot yelling at her again.

I'd much rather the CEO float on down from his pedestal to commune with the peasants, but meh. 

[msw_77]

4 minutes ago, charlsmcfarlane said:

This is a good idea. However, I think getting everyone on the same page is an essential first step. Not the only step that Fiverr need to take here. They need to be able to answer everyone's questions, and fix what is broken. Empathy and clarity are the beginning of fixing this. Not the end.

Yeah but at least fiverr staff deserve to know what actually is going on 🙂

[carineb]

6 minutes ago, emmaki said:

I put the price up every time someone didn't appreciate my service for that gig

I thought I was the only crazy one doing this. 😁

[catwriter]

1 hour ago, visualstudios said:

I feel more like I keep waking up a bug.

If you can't defeat Fiverr bugs...

@emmaki, any NLP resources you'd recommend?

Edited February 18 by catwriter

[charlsmcfarlane]

9 minutes ago, emmaki said:

I put the price up every time someone didn't appreciate my service for that gig

This is genius. I only really put up prices when I hit capacity but this is gold

[strategist_ceo]

The new level system seems to overlook the diverse nature of buyers and sellers on the platform. As sellers gain experience, they inevitably encounter a variety of situations, including instances with unreasonable buyers or those who place orders without fully understanding the context. These scenarios can lead to cancellations that usually do not penalize the seller.

Moreover, this system appears to retroactively punish sellers by factoring in issues that occurred a long time ago. This approach is problematic as it could lead to many established sellers being unfairly demoted, even down to "new seller" status, based on what I have gleaned from discussions.

This level system is very flawed, failing to accurately reflect the experiences and quality of the sellers it evaluates.

[visualstudios]

Just now, charlsmcfarlane said:

This is genius. I only really put up prices when I hit capacity but this is gold

With value for money this seems like a recipe to kill a gig though

[charlsmcfarlane]

4 minutes ago, visualstudios said:

With value for money this seems like a recipe to kill a gig though

True. Although, I'm starting to get the feeling that the same could be said for any action, done for any reason.

Edited February 18 by charlsmcfarlane

[emmaki]

14 minutes ago, catwriter said:

If you can't defeat Fiverr bugs...

@emmaki, any NLP resources you'd recommend?

ChatGPT is a LLM model so you can ask it to give you entities, predicates etc (if you have GPT+ then there's some assistants with all this stuff included)

I also like this: 
https://cloud.google.com/natural-language?hl=en
Scroll down a bit to the "demo". Insert text. Make sure writing is green if you want to write positive things, red if you want to write negative things. Yellow is bad. (go to the sentiment tab for the colors!)

This won't necessarily help with SEO but it will make your text more understandable to bots. It's really a balance between writing for people and for search machines. 

 

13 minutes ago, charlsmcfarlane said:

This is genius. I only really put up prices when I hit capacity but this is gold

It's also an amazing zinger to buyers like that! That buyer, of course, continued to use my gig descriptions long after he left the review because he needed my writing to sell anything. As far as I'm concerned, my review, in Latin or English, was 💯. 

 

12 minutes ago, visualstudios said:

With value for money this seems like a recipe to kill a gig though

Yeah, I wouldn't do a gig like this on Fiverr anymore. Fiverr is too unpredictable at the moment and new sellers today have much higher expectations of Fiverr than they did 6 years ago. $1k minimum I think, which of course prices me out the market and therefore makes it a waste of time when a bunch of $15 level 1 trainerrs are ready to guru their way to the top with gig descriptions that will probably include "I was chosen by Fiverr to do this" as if it wasn't just some AI metric checklist box that preselected a bunch of potential yes-people. 

Edited February 18 by emmaki

[katakatica]

CS said that as long as the order doesn't run late (so the extension goes through etc.) it's fine. 

I have several clients who take their time sending things through (and asking them to hurry up doesn't feel very conflict free 😂) so I asked and that's what they responded. I guess it's a case by case basis? 

(Or... Not everyone was updated about the changes?) 

[leonormiserol]

Well friends, CS just responded to my ticket saying that I deserve level 0. After 10 years on the platform and with only 2 cancellations in the last 2 years. According to them, I have a high negative impact due to cancellations.

"It's important to keep in mind that each Gig's history is examined to determine an individual score that is relative to other freelancers in the same category and price benchmark."

Does it mean that if I lower my prices my score will go up?

Can someone explain to me how that phrase reflects transparency? They are talking to me about something relative, for God's sake.

Nobody takes seriously how this works.
   This means that I will now lose my only source of income. Because I won't even be able to have promoted gigs.

Apparently Fiverr made his decision which is to kill as many as he can in the shortest time. At this point I don't know what to do anymore.