visualstudios

Just looking at your profile shows it clearly - you have over 18.9k reviews, so it's statistically very relevant - the larger the sample size, the more relevant it is. Of those, over 18.2k are 5 stars. If a large percentage of buyers were rating things "randomly", your profile would be the statistical anomaly of the century. It's not "a lot of buyers randomly pressing buttons". That may happen, but it's very rare. At least in your case, it must be, otherwise the rating distribution would look very different. What you've written there can't be true. It's math, simple as that. Unless you're saying that a lot of people rate things randomly, and by sheer luck you have 95+% of those people picking 5 stars - where if the distribution were truly random, we'd expect 20%. That's amazing.

Well, they didn't before. They left 5 star reviews before, they didn't seem to be pressing buttons randomly then. If this new system makes them press buttons more randomly, it's clearly a worse system. Just looking at your profile shows it clearly - you have over 18.9k reviews, so it's statistically very relevant. Of those, over 18.2k are 5 stars. If a relevant percentage of buyers were rating things "randomly", your profile would be the statistical anomaly of the century. It's not "a lot of buyers randomly pressing buttons". That may happen, but it's very rare. At least in your case, it must be, otherwise the rating distribution would look very different.

Then the people on this thread who claim that they got 4 star reviews when their buyers gave maximum ratings everywhere, and even left tips, are lying. Or their buyers are, although that wouldn't make a lot of sense given they left tips. Interesting.

Exactly. And that's why you can't have the cake and eat it too. If it was easier to get 5 star reviews under the old system than the new one, the system is unfair for those who had a ton of previews reviews. This is obvious. If, on the other hand, the difficulty of getting a 5 star review on both is equal, then obviously there's no issue. But then why change it? They change it purposefully, to drop review averages. I may be wrong, time will tell, but I'm willing to bet on it.

You're missing the obvious point. Someone who already has 10k 5 star reviews, under the new system, will have an insurmountable advantage over someone starting on this new system with 10, 20, 100 reviews. The 10k review seller will be able to maintain the 5 star average for years, therefore getting an unfair advantage over everybody else. Doesn't matter if they're not better, and if the reviews they're getting now aren't better. Their profile and gigs will show 5*, where everybody else's will not. If they got rid of the old scores, and everybody started from 0, then the new score average would make sense - everybody would be lower. But that's not the case. Like, if the system had always been like that, since the beginning, nobody would be complaining. There are plenty of platforms where a 4.0 star average is good. What you can't do is condition people for years that it's 5 star or "bad", and then switch it. That doesn't work.

It doesn't even matter if they're used to the old system. Under this new one it can be hard to leave a 5 star review even if you want to, apparently (judging by what some people have commented).

The thing is, if everyone gets 4 star reviews under the new system, it's not differentiating anything. It's just lowering the overall level.

Those are not bad reviews. That's the point - they are normal reviews now. Before, a 4 star review was indeed bad - because most reviews were 5 stars. If, under the new system, everyone gets 4 star reviews, they are no longer bad, they are normal. Reviews are not bad or good by themselves - they are bad or good by comparison. I'd rather have 4 star reviews in a platform where all my competition has 3 stars, than have 4.7 in a platform where all my competition has 5 stars. But if the new system is aimed at making the average review 4 stars (or even 4.5), whereas before the average review was 5 stars, those that accumulated a ton of 5 star reviews under the old system have a huge advantage. That's the problem here. If everyone was starting from 0, it would be fair to have a system that makes the average review be 3 or 4 stars for everyone. But if some people already have thousands of reviews under a system that made it easier to get 5 star reviews, they'll have an unfair advantage over people who need to start under a system that makes those 5 star reviews much harder to get. It's like if you were in school, doing easy tests, and getting 100% on all of them. Suddenly, a new teacher comes in, makes the tests much harder, and people start getting 80%, 70% on them. At the end of the year, all the tests are averaged for your final score. The thing is, some students have been there since the beginning, and some students have taken thousands of easy tests, while others have just started, or have taken few easy tests in the same time. Doesn't matter how good the new students, or the students that have taken the easy tests are - their final score will be worse. Not because they're worse, but because the tests are harder, and they don't have the easy tests to average up. Just a quick thought experiment - imagine if it was the other way around. If reviews on Fiverr had been, for years, averaging 3 stars. The best profiles on the platform were like 4 star average. Suddenly, Fiverr reworks the review system, and everyone starts getting 5 star reviews. New users, or users with fewer reviews, would have higher averages than the people with thousands of reviews. How would they feel about that? The problem here is simple, and it's easy to see - two different review systems, who lend themselves to different end results in terms of ratings, are being equally counted. There will be no difference, from the buyer's perspective, between old and new reviews. And there should be - because the old 5 star reviews are easier to get than the new 5 star reviews. The conclusion is simple - you can't change a review system in a way that impacts the average review left by the client. If you do that, you're either invalidating all previous reviews on the platform, or making the system inherently unfair. If you increase the average review score, it's unfair for those with a ton of reviews. If you decrease it, it's unfair for those with few reviews.

Indeed. Of course, if you have 20k reviews prior to this new review system, you know that you can receive hundreds of 4 star reviews (that seem to be the norm now) and retain your 5 star average for years to come (an average that was obtained when 5 stars reviews were the norm), therefore appearing, to the unsuspecting buyer, to deliver a better service than everyone else. This new system is a net positive for you, then, since it will give you an unfair advantage versus the people who will be impacted directly (and immediately) by it. Yes, everyone's average score will drop, but some will drop much faster than others, while getting the same review average going forward. Interesting.

Hopefully not, I've been banned from reddit several times, and always for no good reason.

I'd like some insights on that, actually. That's the main challenge I'm facing at the moment, I have next to no idea how to get that going, and it's becoming increasingly clear that "just fiverr" is way too risky and uncertain.

I think you jumped the gun a bit with this post. Canceled order reviews are old news, the new review system that will give you a 4 star rating when the client doesn't get to pick any stars at all and is perfectly happy is definitely the big thing for 2023!

Why is that an improvement? More granularity = better, generally speaking. The neat part is they don't - now cancelled orders are eligible for review, so they can cancel after first delivery.

It depends on the interpretation. That's one of the issues with this new system, it's ambiguous. Yes, lower priced buyers are a bigger risk, that's for sure. However, being a higher priced seller can also make you a bigger target (fewer orders, so each order can have a bigger impact). There will also be more people wanting to specifically damage your reputation if you stand out, that's a given. I can see it just by looking at the spam - the number of people pestering me for help has increased proportionally to my account growth. The likelihood of one of these people getting mad at me and wanting to take revenge when I block them is therefore higher. I'm not too worried about it personally, but I don't think this is an improvement. It makes the review process less transparent, not more. It also means low volume / high price sellers will generally need to be extra careful with vetting, increase the value of having request to order gigs exclusively, etc. Am I afraid this will make everything way worse? Not necessarily. But I'm certain that it will not make anything better, so all in all it's a net negative. More downside than upside.

Another point to take into consideration, in regards to expectations - how does it work in terms of repeated buyers? I've had clients that were very surprised with the first video I did for them - it clearly exceeded their expectations - it was exceptional. However, when they come to me again, and ask for something very similar, then they aren't surprised any longer, since I'll do something in the same exact style, and at the same quality level. It won't exceed their expectations then - they will have raised them due to our previous work, and we will simply meet their updated expectations. It will be very good, but not "exceptional" - it is what they are expecting. Being perfect, in this regard, is to be consistent, not to be "exceeding expectations" constantly. How should they reply to that feedback form? Doesn't that mean that doing consistent work, always at the same quality level, for the same client will lead to lower reviews? Doesn't that mean that it is expected of sellers to keep increasing their quality with each project for the same client? Because that is not only unrealistic, it is downright impossible. Or look at gigs that deliver a very specific thing - like "I'll place your logo on this billboard", or "I'll customize this google search animation to be searching for your brand name". How can that ever exceed expectations? As a client, I expect to get something that is exactly like I was shown. A gig like that can never exceed my expectations, unless the seller surprises me in some way with something I did not order. This may lead to sellers offering extra stuff that wasn't ordered for free, in the hopes of increasing their rating. This is somewhat manipulative, imo, and it's bad for sellers and for Fiverr (as they could be making commission on the sale of those extras instead).

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.