Fiverr just updated the rating system, how do you feel about it?

[pamdemic]

9 minutes ago, karyface1 said:

When will this happen? Did they give an actual date ??

The update confirmed that these changes have already been rolled out. 

[mozaski]

11 hours ago, landongrace said:

I believe I just got my first review under the new system.  It is very misleading.  My customer chose the 5 stars (Exceptional) and then checked boxes.  I then received a 4.7.  Is this correct?

Other than that first question, Fiverr will show the  buyer follow up questions like "How would you rate the value of this delivery?" which are used to form your rating. Maybe they choose something else for that.

[emmaki]

1 hour ago, priyank_mod said:

As of now - the majority of sellers in the marketplace seem to be between 4.8 to 5.0. So the previous steps didn't really yield the desired results. 

tbf the emoji rating/ss combo only increased the pressure to get 5-star reviews since you need 4.7 minimum to get all the nice things. IIRC, before emojis, you needed to get 4.7 to progress and that was also reduced in... August 2023? when the cancellation reviews came in and Fiverr did a "we really do listen to you guys, see!?!" change and made it 4.2 to recognize the impact of cancellation reviews.

That's a lot of mucking about with a pretty fundamental system so it's not surprising that it is broken.

Fiverr needs to realize that it created the conditions that make its sellers so obsessed with 5 stars. It comes from Fiverr's own poorly-designed systems that require 5 star perfection to "stay on top". But speaking as someone who has nothing but 5 star reviews for the past 2 years (probably, I still can't be bothered to check) and with a SS of 10, I have 5 orders this year. Where is my reward for matching my working style to meet Fiverr's out-of-control ratings and level systems?

Fiverr knows - and we know - that there is nothing wrong with reviews from, let's say, 3.5 to 5 stars just about everywhere else. But here on Fiverr, you need consistent 5s and 10s to get anywhere. And even then, after all that work, there's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

On the buyer side, a lot of buyers understand Fiverr's weird approach to all this dole out 5 star reviews because they're normal people and while they might not be 5-star happy about something, they don't want to ruin someone's income and potentially their life. It's also a lot easier to just tick all the boxes and write "X was amazing go X wow great", not write a small novella that follows coaching (like me):

Fiverr wants a marketplace with integrity and yadda-yadda, yet its product designers appear incapable of understanding how its products actually work in the real world, even when their users go blue in the face screaming at them that this is a terrible idea. For example, think of VFM - see how the price range is displayed just above the review box?

Also, Fiverr, please fix the grammatical errors in your advice. I do realize that you automated that segment to only show whatever boxes the buyer checked, but you do realize that with the magic of ✨parsing and text formatting✨, you can fix that with AI software?

Like I said in Feb-Mar, the best thing Fiverr can do rn is to just burn the whole review/ratings to the ground and start everyone at 0 with a new system that isn't corrupted and polluted by 14 years of horrible review system decision-making. I'll be the first to howl and scream about how unfair it is 🙂 

I look forward to the next terrible change to a broken system that doesn't address the real elephant in the room: the masses of unqualified, untalented sellers who are on the platform only to make money at everyone else's expense, now with AI to almost completely hide their inadequacy. Until Fiverr does something about them, things will not change.

/soapbox

[priyank_mod]

40 minutes ago, emmaki said:

the real elephant in the room: the masses of unqualified, untalented sellers who are on the platform only to make money at everyone else's expense, now with AI to almost completely hide their inadequacy.

 

Wish there was a way to pin this bit somewhere, where it kinda screams & reminds everyone every day about the 🦣. 

Edited May 21 by priyank_mod

[emmaki]

How about a nice banner post at the top? I bet the forum has widgets or predefined slots for ads/cool banner posts.

Edited May 21 by emmaki

[donnovan86]

1 hour ago, pamdemic said:

The update confirmed that these changes have already been rolled out. 

Finally I can talk.. :)) that 10 post limit is ridiculous.. 

Anyway, I can confirm the changes have been rolled out because my general account rating changed from 4.9 to 5, and it wasn't like that before. 

[emmaki]

Me: 😠👿😡👹👺

 

Edited May 21 by emmaki
although do you KNOW how long rec to a friend has been 4.whatever for me?!?!? FINALLY 5

[mariashtelle1]

1 hour ago, priyank_mod said:

Wish there was a way to pin this bit somewhere, where it kinda screams & reminds everyone every day about the 🦣. 

Pin this post? 😁 it will be sooner deleted rather than pinned. I see some topics are disappearing and being deleted, so it’s just a matter of time for this one to disappear too. 
 

Maybe “the firm” needs a reminder to what happened to the last person that was running things in the same manner here expecting only love, unicorns and praise fiverr posts. 

[pamdemic]

51 minutes ago, donnovan86 said:

Finally I can talk.. :)) that 10 post limit is ridiculous.. 

Anyway, I can confirm the changes have been rolled out because my general account rating changed from 4.9 to 5, and it wasn't like that before. 

Interesting! Thanks for confirming it. 

[mariashtelle1]

58 minutes ago, emmaki said:

I enjoyed that comment

And here we again, spiralling back to copy pasted messages as it used to be 2 years ago. “I think your thoughts are not valid, would you like to edit it to sound more like a rosy BS we are promoting? By the way please write to me your comments so I can toss it to the bin and never implement” 

how often do we need to share our “constructive feedback”? We do it all the time and every couple of months stuff charges and we start the cycle all over again. But now with a limit of 10 posts so we wouldn’t complain too much 😁

[emmaki]

6 minutes ago, mariashtelle1 said:

And here we again, spiralling back to copy pasted messages as it used to be 2 years ago. “I think your thoughts are not valid, would you like to edit it to sound more like a rosy BS we are promoting? By the way please write to me your comments so I can toss it to the bin and never implement” 

how often do we need to share our “constructive feedback”? We do it all the time and every couple of months stuff charges and we start the cycle all over again. But now with a limit of 10 posts so we wouldn’t complain too much 😁

tbf that comment is from like 2 years ago or something. I found it when I was looking for the price lock promises for SP the other day, as I had to browse through someone's post history to find stuff.

[mariashtelle1]

Just now, emmaki said:

tbf that comment is from like 2 years ago or something

Ah so I was right about the timeline 😂 

but we are heading towards that anyway. 

[emmaki]

Gotta keep things sparkly for the investors, I guess. Without its (good) sellers and buyers, Fiverr has nothing. And as far as I can tell, the exodus is only speeding up. 

[catwriter]

Beneficial to ALL members of the community? AI-empowered scammers included?

[lenasemenkova]

Aw.

I’ve been running around with CPTSD for years and at some point finally arrived at a responsible adult conclusion that it was crippling certain aspects of my life and needed to be addressed. Unfortunately for me, I arrived at that conclusion in January 2022 (hilarious timing on my part). Didn’t have a chance to deal with it yet, the line is too long these days. 

Fiverr is a lot of “direct” stress and it’s fine. Great for anxiety, sort of like fighting fire with fire. Would recommend. You got yourself a difficult customer, you know for sure you’re on your own. The order becomes your dungeon, it’s your job to crawl out of it with the loot without losing your cool or triggering the ToS in 12 hours or less even if there are 24 hours on the timer. 

What is difficult to deal with, is this “sOoN we’ll implement the changes, you won’t know exactly when but keep an eye on those metrics of yours, you never know when it hits you but one day it sure will, very, very soon. Not right now, though…” If you’re going to do it every 3 months, maybe just tear the bandaid off without the preamble next time. 

I wish it was frustrating. Frustration is a great fuel for work. Exhaustion isn’t. 

[arafatcoco]

Until get the review from buyer, I can't say anything yet.

 

[themarineiguana]

On 5/20/2024 at 8:17 AM, donnovan86 said:

• Public scores for our gigs will only reflect the average score for the past 2 years.

This is a legitimately impressive and very smart improvement. I've been really dunking on Fiverr for some time about some of their buyer-at-the-expense-of-all-reason policies which — admittedly — have actually alienated me from the platform recently (especially that awful buyers-can-leave-reviews-on-cancelled-orders policy 🤦).

Nevertheless, making it so reviews only reflect recent history I think is extremely helpful. Let's look at some potential scenarios:

1) If a buyer's review was generally unfair, then all the better that a seller doesn't have to see it as a permanent stain on their record.

2) If a buyer's review was generally fair, but the seller has since improved, then they don't have to worry about a mark on their record that no longer reflects the quality of their service.

3) If the buyer's review was generally fair, but the seller hasn't improved, it's very unlikely limiting to only their last two years of reviews will give a false indication of their services.

Overall, smart decision.

This one gets a kudos. 🍫 (<-- sorry, the candy bar emoji is the closest one I could find to a Kudos™ bar)

[Kesha]

On 5/20/2024 at 2:54 PM, letsdo1 said:

A few questions

• When does this actually kick in?
• What bit does the 2 year thing actually affect - the public rating 5*, the level system, the success score?
• I take it this will be a rolling 2 year thing so will start from May 2022 to 24 and then from June 22 to 24 etc?

Hi! Just jumping in to answer your question. 

- the change was effective since Monday, May 9. 

- The change only affects public reviews. 

- Reviews will be 2 years from your most recent review.

Thanks!

[texvox]

I was glad to see that Fiverr did listen to feedback and rolled back some of the more questionable additions like emojis. +1 to Fiverr in my book for showing that their people do pay attention to the forums!

Some of the changes I don't necessarily like, such as the limited editing window for buyers to amend their reviews, but you can't win them all and I don't expect Fiverr to cater to me specifically so I'll deal with that. Overall, it looks like the changes are somewhat minimal in my book which works for me since the platform as-is has worked well enough for the last 2 years for my business.

[donnovan86]

22 minutes ago, texvox said:

Some of the changes I don't necessarily like, such as the limited editing window for buyers to amend their reviews, but you can't win them all and I don't expect Fiverr to cater to me specifically so I'll deal with that.

I mean.. few sellers reply to a review right away, especially if it's during night time. Most sellers take at least a few minutes, sometimes hours or more to reply. So unless the buyer is dealing with a person like me that's online quite a bit, it's not an issue. 

[newspoet]

Is it bad if I never even saw or noticed emoji ratings?

But as a recent buyer, I think I've figured out one of the reasons we're getting blasted in the private reviews. The whole approach is conspiratorial. "Just between us how did things [REALLY] go?" You know, "just between you and me...nobody else has to know..." It almost makes you want to question your initial 5-star review you left for the seller, as if they don't believe you or they believe that if you think about it again, your answer will be different. Then they asking you to rate the gig from 1-5 stars, WITH 5 BEING "PERFECT." So, yeah it was great, exceptional, over-delivered, more than I expected..... but was it PERFECT? It was good enough that I was going to leave my Seller a tip, but the platform wanted to tack on a $2.78 fee to a $5 tip. That's after they tacked on $3.88 to the $25 order. And then they are going to take 20% of the original $25 ($5) from the seller on top of that.

I can see how a lot of Sellers are getting a 4 where they probably deserve a 5 and how buyers are duped into leaving what they believe is constructive feedback, when what they are really doing is sabatoging the same sellers they in many cases are returning to time and time again for repeat orders, totally unaware they are unintentionally stabbing their favorite sellers in the back every time they respond to these bizzare conspiratorial private requests. As someone with a Masters degree in English, the whole private feedback soliciation reads to me like the platform is wanting you to reconsider the public ratings you gave and lowball the ratings you give sellers in private.

A lot of people might not have received exactly what they wanted because THEY didn't communicate their needs well, and who knowing this did not leave a public review that could be refuted, are now being encouraged to unload the blame on sellers who have no way of explaning or defending what they cannot see. I don't understand the ethics of a platform that starting out being paid a percentage to simply provide a platform for freelancers now sabatoging freelancers' livelihoods with these shenanigans, or even worse exploiting sellers by tanking their exposure with algorithms based on secret data only to promise better exposure to those sellers who purchase extra services such as "promoted gigs."

I don't want to be negative, but it sucks as a seller when a plaform that overcharges for their "services" stacks the deck against the very people they were supposed to be serving in the first place. If I can't rise to top in Content Writing after 10 years on the platform, when I am a native speaker and have two degrees in the field, then who can?

Edited May 22 by newspoet
typo / clarification

[rabihumakhan]

The 'value for money' thingy seems nonsensical to be dead honest. 

For instance, someone's come here looking to get a job done at $30 and they found me to be their perfect choice; however, my rate for the job is $50. The buyer needs the job done and has no way other than paying me $50 despite they wanted it done at $30.... 

Would they believe, at the end of the order, that my work was 'value for money' or whatever is the exact wording? 

Another thing that bothers me is the 'perfection'. 

OK, a buyer rated my work as 5 stars but was it perfect? 

Is there anything as perfect? It'd hit me to the ground, if, God forbid, the buyer thinks my work wasn't ''perfect''....