Official feedback thread re: the new leveling system

[vhskid]

32 minutes ago, emmaki said:

 

Guys, have you seen this? Not my post, but @rawque_gulia commented that as a buyer, he had seen the return of stars in place of emojis... 

 

Hmmm, amnesia?

 

On 3/8/2024 at 7:00 PM, emmaki said:

I remember when Fiverr tried to convince us that 3 stars wasn't seen as a "negative rating" by the system. 

I guess that was another little lie. 

 

 

On 3/8/2024 at 6:26 PM, visualstudios said:

Ok, so they removed the emojis. However:

The scale is still unbalanced. 

Very poor - Poor - Average - Very good - Exceptional

This is not a fair scale.

Other interesting things of note:

3 is considered a "low rating" - in other words, average is bad.

4 stars ("very good") can only have negative qualifiers - you can't rate 4 and praise anything.

 

[emmaki]

Look at the Help Center page for reviews. Emojis. They updated it over the weekend (the topic of my post there).

Call it amnesia if you want, but I'll go with confusion. I suppose the end result looks the same 🙂 It's also well outside of the "transition period" when all of these tests were supposed to be finished and we were meant to get used to the review system.

https://help.fiverr.com/hc/en-us/articles/360049982353-Reviews-and-ratings - have a look yourself...

(I don't buy, so I have no idea what they're doing on the actual reviews)

[farshad19rodar]

Has Fiverr restored the old questions?🤔 I see the old questions in the last two deliveries I have, and my rating has returned to 5 from 4.9.
 

[vhskid]

32 minutes ago, emmaki said:

Look at the Help Center page for reviews. Emojis. They updated it over the weekend (the topic of my post there).

I know and I'm following your topic. 

 

9 minutes ago, emmaki said:

(I don't buy, so I have no idea what they're doing on the actual reviews)

I don't as well, I just have an elephant memory (which can be a blessing and a curse).

 

10 minutes ago, emmaki said:

Call it amnesia if you want, but I'll go with confusion. I suppose the end result looks the same 🙂 It's also well outside of the "transition period" when all of these tests were supposed to be finished and we were meant to get used to the review system.

I would say that with the new level / scoring system everything is in a continuous transition period. By design (keeping everyone on their toes, over a cliff, every second of every day) and due to incompetent product release.

I, myself not getting used to anything. The stars' comeback included.

[emmaki]

Well yes, the whole idea behind the new system is to make sure everyone performs like an olympic athlete every day of the year while "reducing the pressure" to get 5-star reviews.

Either way, between this, the inability to combat scammers, and the Seller Plus thing, Fiverr's definitely winning all the rewards for incompetent platform management this year.

It would be a shame if Fiverr ended with a mass transition of sellers and buyers to slightly less garbage platforms.

[vhskid]

8 minutes ago, emmaki said:

Either way, between this, the inability to combat scammers, and the Seller Plus thing, Fiverr's definitely winning all the rewards for incompetent platform management this year.

For those without SP - what's the Seller Plus controversy?

[cucinavivace]

49 minutes ago, farshad19rodar said:

Has Fiverr restored the old questions?🤔 I see the old questions in the last two deliveries I have, and my rating has returned to 5 from 4.9.
 

In an earlier post I mentioned that when companies use distributed network services that cover the globe instead of a central server, it can sometimes take quite a while for the changes to propagate everywhere and to all servers.

I got two reviews the same day last week and one had these three items and one had the "value of" questions. So, for the questions and for the stars/emoji, it's possible that it's still just not consistent everywhere rather than that they're changing it back and forth.

Sometimes the delays are the nature of the cloud, and sometimes they're just incompetence (this long should probably be considered incompetence - SURPRISE).

Edited April 2 by cucinavivace

[emmaki]

When Seller Plus launched, they offered a locked in discount rate ($19) to people who were invited pre-launch. I was one of them. The price was meant to stay at $19 until you cancelled the sub. Then you would have to pay regular rates.

On April Fool's Day (lol) they sent an email to me and seemingly everyone else with locked in prices. They basically broke their promise and shredded up a bit more trust that anyone might have had in the platform.

I did the math: $19 to $39 is (aside from being a 50% price increase) is an extra $3,800. I have come to the conclusion that Fiverr is living in poverty and must push aside morals and principles to shake out some more dollars from people. Anyway, seems like Fiverr's happy to break our trust over $20, which says a lot about how they value them - and how cheap they are when it comes to breaking their promises.

It's not really the price increase that annoys me. It's the broken promise.

[cucinavivace]

2 minutes ago, emmaki said:

When Seller Plus launched, they offered a locked in discount rate ($19) to people who were invited pre-launch. I was one of them. The price was meant to stay at $19 until you cancelled the sub. Then you would have to pay regular rates.

On April Fool's Day (lol) they sent an email to me and seemingly everyone else with locked in prices. They basically broke their promise and shredded up a bit more trust that anyone might have had in the platform.

I did the math: $19 to $39 is (aside from being a 50% price increase) is an extra $3,800. I have come to the conclusion that Fiverr is living in poverty and must push aside morals and principles to shake out some more dollars from people. Anyway, seems like Fiverr's happy to break our trust over $20, which says a lot about how they value them - and how cheap they are when it comes to breaking their promises.

It's not really the price increase that annoys me. It's the broken promise.

That's a 100% price increase, my friend. And unconscionable. Happy AFD.

That's been my problem with all these changes. It's not that they make things too hard. It's the untrustworthy lack of transparency and commitment to their own rules. They're both greedy and sneaky now.

Edited April 2 by cucinavivace

[vhskid]

Oh yeah, the classic subscription-based service launch move - promise lifetime 50% off and then do a terms update. 

 

 

 

Edited April 2 by vhskid

[emmaki]

8 minutes ago, cucinavivace said:

That's a 100% price increase, my friend. And unconscionable. Happy AFD.

That's been my problem with all these changes. It's not that they make things too hard. It's the untrustworthy lack of transparency and commitment to their own rules. They're both greedy and sneaky now.

100%? Man, I suck at math.

And yeah, it's all a bit AppSumo "deal", right down to the part where the service gets worse and worse until the devs do a disappearing app unless you pony up. And even if you pony up.

[priyank_mod]

Just gonna leave it here...😇

 

[emmaki]

46 minutes ago, priyank_mod said:

Just gonna leave it here...😇

 

Little does Joanna know that on Fiverr, everyone gets taken to the cleaners by AI! 

[greggidneyvo]

On 3/26/2024 at 2:53 AM, donnovan86 said:

Private reviews play a massive role. If you have no private review from other clients or just a few of them (A lot of people don't leave private reviews when they are happy), but also a negative private review, that negative one will have a lot more influence than you realize. I had this happen to me last year, before all these changes. And it took a LOT of time to recover, half a year or so. I have no idea how these changes affected that recovery time, if it's longer or shorter. Just do your best and try to keep people happy. There's nothing else to do at this point.

Private reviews are shady and do not reflect the seller / Fiverr relationship as being up front and is a gross violation of transparency.
There was nothing wrong with the Star system.  If the client wasn't happy, was there not already a place for them to mention their concerns? Of course there was (is)

Now, Fiverr goes behind the backs of the sellers and asks: "Tell us what you really think... and don't worry, the seller won't see this review" There might as well be a "Pssst, hey..." in the first line of the review!

I mean... that is so shady... I don't know how you can call this fair.

I have had ZERO negative reviews, and now I hear my 'boss' is whispering behind my back?  When there was a perfectly good system already in place??  Are you kidding? 

[arianelaurent]

11 hours ago, cucinavivace said:

I got two reviews the same day last week and one had these three items and one had the "value of" questions. So, for the questions and for the stars/emoji, it's possible that it's still just not consistent everywhere rather than that they're changing it back and forth.

In a meeting last week with my SM, they said that they're still testing both stars and emoji....

[virgoca]

9 minutes ago, arianelaurent said:

In a meeting last week with my SM, they said that they're still testing both stars and emoji....

well I hope they realize quickly that stars are a significantly better visual option for buyers. It makes no sense that we are rated in stars, and the buyers have no way of knowing how many stars they are giving us.

[cucinavivace]

11 hours ago, cucinavivace said:

I got two reviews the same day last week and one had these three items and one had the "value of" questions. So, for the questions and for the stars/emoji, it's possible that it's still just not consistent everywhere rather than that they're changing it back and forth.

15 minutes ago, arianelaurent said:

In a meeting last week with my SM, they said that they're still testing both stars and emoji....

Those are just icons. They wouldn't change the rating questions back and forth between old and new too. The poster I was replying to showed a new rating with the old questions. I was saying I've had similar issues.

Edited April 2 by cucinavivace

[donnovan86]

7 hours ago, greggidneyvo said:

I mean... that is so shady... I don't know how you can call this fair.

 

I've been here for 10+ years at this point and these private reviews were only introduced in the past couple of years. And they were introduced because a lot of sellers were taking advantage of buyers, there were buyers on the forum that were constantly complaining sellers were forcing them to leave a very positive review to get their work. Some even left a review and never got their money back. So you can see why Fiverr introduced these reviews. 

I am not sure where you got the idea that I think private reviews are fair. I don't think they should exist. But due to circumstances beyond our control as a seller, they exist and they affect us. My problem is not that they exist, it's the fact that they have a lot of weight in the algorithm. If they would considered every autocomplete order with an automatic good private review, that's fine. But a lot of people don't leave private reviews. Generally only unhappy people do, and since these private reviews have a lot of weight, that can damage your ranking and you have no idea why. Especially when there are people that only leave private reviews after marking the order as complete. 

[frank_d]

On 4/2/2024 at 2:13 PM, emmaki said:

When Seller Plus launched, they offered a locked in discount rate ($19) to people who were invited pre-launch. I was one of them. The price was meant to stay at $19 until you cancelled the sub. Then you would have to pay regular rates.

On April Fool's Day (lol) they sent an email to me and seemingly everyone else with locked in prices. They basically broke their promise and shredded up a bit more trust that anyone might have had in the platform.

I did the math: $19 to $39 is (aside from being a 50% price increase) is an extra $3,800. I have come to the conclusion that Fiverr is living in poverty and must push aside morals and principles to shake out some more dollars from people. Anyway, seems like Fiverr's happy to break our trust over $20, which says a lot about how they value them - and how cheap they are when it comes to breaking their promises.

It's not really the price increase that annoys me. It's the broken promise.

And to make matters worse, the initial batch of users that got the $19 price were a little over 100 people.

So Fiverr decided to squander any trust built initially just to get 100 or so people to pay like everyone else.

Fiverr built the entire feature by testing it on that initial group of sellers and for the longest time, the entire program was pretty much deprived of features.

[emmaki]

1 minute ago, frank_d said:

And to make matters worse, the initial batch of users that got the $19 price were a little over 100 people.

So Fiverr decided to squander any trust built initially just to get 100 or so people to pay like everyone else.

Fiverr built the entire feature by testing it on that initial group of sellers and for the longest time, the entire program was pretty much deprived of features.

What makes it even crazier is that this initial batch of people was those who Fiverr professes to value as their best performers (at least, that's what it was sold to me as). Isn't that the last group of people you'd want to irritate, since (in theory) they would be making the most money, delivering the best services, and delivering far more in monthly value than.... $19 extra bucks a month? 

It just makes no sense at any level. The money really isn't the important thing here, and Fiverr has completely failed, again, to communicate to sellers how much it values them. This is nickel-and-diming at its worst. Yet all my SM had to offer was a tour of the benefits. No, really: 



The whole "price alignment" thing is a crazy argument too. It's essentially contempt. 

[donnovan86]

1 hour ago, emmaki said:

The whole "price alignment" thing is a crazy argument too. It's essentially contempt. 

Yeah. We've added a lot of valuable tools!

The last 3 additions are pretty much things you can do yourself, reaching out to previous customers, coupons, pretty much all the newer features are bad and I don't see any use for them. So.. price alignment for what, useless features? I totally agree, it's contempt.

Are they preparing a new set of must-have features for Seller Plus? Most likely not.

[emmaki]

It would make a lot more sense to roll out some cool new amazing feature with the price increase,  but what's left?

• Be a Neo Favorite! - Fiverr Neo will recommend you over other choices, even if they're better, because you're the only thing keeping the good ship Fiverr afloat right now
• Success Therapist! - You can book a session with a Fiverr therapist! It costs extra, but you get access. The therapist will have a soothing voice and always ask you about your relationship with your father
• Buyer-B-Gon! SPP members now have exclusive access to the block button before, during and after an order! When you press the button, a pleasing video of SWAT closing in on the terrified Fbuyer will play. HAH! Take that, bad buyer!
• Fiverr Shop! You asked for cool Fiverr merch, we've got it! Our lurid green tees and sweats will go great with your Lidl casualwear (seriously has anyone seen Lidl's clothing? It's SO UGLY). Only open to SPP. No discounts. Probably made on a knockoff version of Printify, shrinks, fades, and bobbles after one wash.
• Cut Some #Slack! Join an exclusive slack channel where you can now moan celebrate Fiverr's awesomeness in real time! All of SP I can do this I guess.

Is that enough? Can I go home now?

EDIT: I apologize in advance for the horrors below:

Edited April 3 by emmaki

[priyank_mod]

24 minutes ago, donnovan86 said:

Pretty much all the newer features are bad and I don't see any use for them.

It almost and always felt like they were trying too hard to give us some namesake features, which give us the delusion of control and command over our business!! 

While for real, we continue to remain at the mercy of private feedback and whims of the buyers.. 🥲

[donnovan86]

25 minutes ago, priyank_mod said:

It almost and always felt like they were trying too hard to give us some namesake features, which give us the delusion of control and command over our business!! 

 

Realistically, we are never in control unless we have our own platform and we decide everything. As I said countless times, as sellers we have very limited power. Even all that outrage about the new level system and review system didn't change anything. People are still getting unwarranted 4 star reviews, many sellers had an unjust demotion (at least based on the data we know/see)... So yeah, I am definitely trying to expand to other avenues as well, because sticking just with Fiverr or any other single freelance platform for that matter, is not a wise idea. It has become way too volatile.

[whitney_writer4]

As a new freelancer, the new leveling system doesn't seem to affect me in any way.