visualstudios

Of course, that's not the issue. I didn't say I wanted to pay for sales, instead of clicks. You do not pay for impressions, btw - you pay for clicks. Which creates the following issue - I can search for my competitors services, click on all the promoted gigs I see, with no intention to buy, and I'm costing them money. I'm sure you see the problem there. But anyway. The least they could do is targeting the ads. No need to acquire buyer data. They already have the data that matters. Orders completed, types of service bought, average price paid, buyer location. That's all I need.

Yep, this is the problem. Advertising in 2023 must be targetable.

Not the same with google, as google allows me to target advertising. I can select the countries I want to hit, for example. That alone would solve that spam problem on Fiverr, as it always comes from the same 3 or 4 places. If 90% of my business on Fiverr comes from a certain place, why can't I chose to do promoted gigs just for buyers that are from that place? That's what would make sense. I don't want more eyeballs on my service. I want fewer, better, more qualified eyeballs. It's like opening a Ferrari dealership and advertising it in a lower income neighborhood. Even if you get a ton of traffic to the store, it's actually worse to have that traffic than having none. They'll waste your salesmen time, drink your complementary coffee, and generate 0 in sales.

I'm not. They are conflating two different things. One thing is quality. The other is expectations. Those are not the same metric, so they shouldn't ask for one and convert it to the other. You would think so, wouldn't you? Not necessarily the case. I've seen the most demanding, unrealistic buyers at lower prices.

I have worse examples than this. This one cost me nothing. What about spammers who contact me through promoted gigs? I pay for those contacts. Fiverr refuses to reimburse me the cost of that click, after I mark it as spam. What?

I've always said that, and I remember getting some backlash for it. When I was here saying "4,5 is a bad review due to the way the system works, you can't keep working with clients that consistently rate you anything other than 5 - even if in any normal platform a 4.0 review is good", people disagreed. This is what this system creates. The constant pressure for "perfection", coupled with the low value clients, low earnings (you can't demand perfection and have a platform with prices way lower than the professional industries of each respective vertical) is nonsense.

Wanna talk about it? Spammers are "Fiverr Pro clients" now.

But that's the issue... It's not a "crowd at the top". It's everyone. Everyone has 5 star ratings. It's either 5 stars, or nothing - if you're under 4.9/4.8 (which is 5 in practice), you won't stick around, there's no point. Changing a system that always worked like that without starting all over again (basically remove all previous reviews and start from scratch) is not possible.

Yep. With the new system being Pro is actually worse for you in a way. Not even taking price into account, just having the badge there will ostensibly increase expectations, therefore likely lowering the review you get - all else being equal.

YES. It's very disheartening, specially in workload intense areas like mine (video editing), to see sellers with bad gigs, bad quality, and downright bad editing (I can tell, it's my line of work), making way more than I'm making, all while outsourcing like crazy to people who edit that garbage for pennies on the dollar. I outsource nothing (of the editing, I outsource things like voice over or graphic design, but that's explicit for the client from the beginning - that's not my line of work, and I don't claim to be a professional in those fields, or to sell those services by themselves). I refuse low quality projects. I don't want to sell garbage just because there's a chance I "can get away with it on volume because clients don't know any better". But am I rewarded for it? Not in terms of levels, or badges - in terms of actual earnings and quality clients? Nope.

In addition, the way the emoji scale is described is weird. "How was the quality of the delivery in relation to your expectation?" is not the same as what shows up in the review - "quality of delivery". Those are two different things. What happens now, with this new system is very simple: An ok seller that delivers an ok result, but has a buyer that (either because the seller conditioned him to, or for price reasons) has very low expectations, is likely to get an exceptional (5 star) result. It's easy to beat expectations where there are next to none, and it's easy to beat expectations for 5 bucks. A professional seller, that delivers a good result, but that is exactly what the buyer was expecting (which is what should happen, and is in any case better than the case above), is likely to get a 3 or 4 star result - because you can't beat sky high expectations. So, better end result matching expectations is worse than worse end result that beats expectations that happen to be low. This will make it less attractive to position yourself as an high end, quality seller, and will encourage people to always undersell. This means lower pricing and less attractive gigs (the better the gig looks, the higher the expectations any reasonable buyer will have, and under this system high expectations are dangerous) will be better reviewed.

Overall this new system seems to be aimed at lowering ratings across the board. Some points on this: 1 - Yes, a marketplace with all 5's everywhere can seem suspicious. However, I'm not sure Fiverr would rather have 4's everwhere, do you think that will increase sales? Specially for long time users, who are already used to how the system works, and know by now to avoid any gig with a 4 star review average, as that has always been bad? 2 - How will this be applied to different sellers? Imagine that going forward, with the new system, the average rating everyone will get is 4.5, because the system is more punitive. If a seller has 10 thousand reviews on a gig, they'll go years while maintaining a 5 star public review average, since the new 4.5 reviews they will be getting going forward will take a really long time to bring the average down. Therefore they'll be unfairly given an advantage vs a seller with fewer reviews, not because their work is better (they're both getting the same review average from now on), but because 95% of their work was reviewed using a different, more lenient system, so they have a huge headstart of perfect 5 star reviews, that were very easy to get before. This is a major problem. Yes, their private score will be the same, so they will be impacted equally in terms of search results, etc., but from the buyer's perspective all they will see is a seller with a 4.5 gig and a seller with a 5.0 gig - even if their current performance is exactly the same.

I find that the labels (and emojis) on the rating system are not balanced. While "exceptional" is better than the previous "perfect" (as nothing is "perfect"), it's not a linear progression. To be consistent, it should go: Very poor -> poor -> average -> good -> very good. Why is one step down from average "poor", but one step above average "very good"? That system seems designed to make lower grades more frequent. Also it's strange that the negatives are "poor" and "very poor", while the positives are "good" and "exceptional". The language could be more neutral using the suggestion I provided above. "Very good" should be enough for the top end, if a buyer is truly amazed, they can always leave a tip for exceptional service (going "above and beyond").

No. Although, in the case of X, probably yeah since they themselves can't own the copyright for what is just an unicode character lol

Don't do it again. You ain't getting paid for that, and you should have known better.

What are you uncertain about? Would be difficult to find a more obvious example of breaking TOS than that.

They could be grouped, yes, but I don't see a big downside to the way it's implemented now. They could also make the inbound messages be on the left and the outbound on the right, as plenty of applications do, but again those are minimal improvements. Calling it "horrendous" is quite the overstatement. As for "visual chaos"... There's plenty of space there to have the avatar before every message. It doesn't look cluttered, or disorganized. It also has upsides, like being able to screenshot a single message and always have it include the sender information and picture, which wouldn't happen if you could have 10 messages in a row with just one avatar and name for all of them - if you wanted to just capture one in the middle, it would have no information about the sender.

They're still trying with the .scr files?

Be afraid, be very afraid.

The best way to answer such questions is not to answer such questions. It's pointless. Also, that wasn't even a question...

Starlink? For real now, certain operators may be down, while others are not. Or landline internet may be down, and cellular data still be up, for example.

The internet is down in an entire country because of a fire in one building? That's... odd if true

Maybe? Why even go to the trouble of stealing their identity, if they can just ask for $350 directly lol. This is not a "maybe", this is not sophisticated, this is not a grand operation. This is as basic as it gets, and if someone needs to come and ask about it, they shouldn't be allowed on the internet in the first place. It's straight up saying "hey, I have money for you, pay me first and then I'll send you the money". If someone approached you on the street and said "hey, give me 20 bucks, and I'll come back here tomorrow and give you $200", would anyone fall for the "scam"? I fail to see the difference.

I suppose it will depend on the field of work. Doing what I do I can't imagine not being at a computer, a phone is not a substitute anyway...

It would be cool if the App had feature parity with the desktop version for sure. I find using the desktop version much better, so that's what I end up doing and only use the app on the go for quick messages, so it doesn't affect me much, but it would be an improvement. I think the challenge there is UI, how to cram so much information into a tiny view.