emmaki

True, true. Perplexity is my new favorite search engine, even though it's basically just Google SERPs in an AI dress. The good old days of knowledge involved books and this, which amazed me with it's video and sound clips. AND IT HAD A GAME.

perhaps the press release has a typo and it should have read "radicalizing level of transparency".

("can't you translate?") No. You're a walking bad review, mate.

I don't think the empty success scores have any impact at all. Most of my gigs look like this.

It seems to be a young person thing (the "I only want to work on my phone" thing). I mean, you can technically make a whole online business using an app on your mobile phone only (see: Instagram, TikTok) and influencers on those platforms will quite happily tell you that they do this. Which I find quite disingenuous, because while they do significant parts of their public-facing business on the phone, I bet the boring back office stuff is done on a laptop - or outsourced to someone who is doing it on a laptop. It also seems to be the case that younger generations are not as good on a computer as, say, millennials are. I find this slightly bizarre as I always thought it would be as it was historically, that younger people were better at tech than their elders. However, appears to have been a general regression across society. AI does not fill me with hope for a future full of smart people. To cite one example of a regression: it used to be that people would simply Google something if they didn't know something. Now, they don't bother and ask other people to give them answers that they could look up on Google. If prodded about it, they are surprised that such a concept exists. For all the knowledge that we have at our fingertips with/without Google, it's not being accessed or used. r/Fiverr is a great example of the same 3 questions asked over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. So.... does this mean in a few years or decades, people won't even ask the AI helpbot implanted in their head the answer to questions and instead rely on other people to ask their implants? I mean, there will always be smart people who don't do this and learn stuff, but I'm talking about the majority of people here. The masses. I could just be getting old and complaining about how rubbish young people are though. That's a timeless hobby for the ages. Just think, a few decades from now, people will look at anyone my age and go "wow, they saw so much change... they lived before the internet and AI and smartphones AND they had to work, wow. The things they have seen" as if we all roamed the earth like some sort of bereft dinosaurs in search of a way to escape the boredom of not being entertained 1001% all of the time. Entropy, entropy, they've all got it entropy!

I think I speak for everyone when I say that we'd rather Fiverr fix the numerous bugs that inevitably impact the scores which impact our status and income on the platform, rather than introduce even more new bugs and glitches to the system in the name of transparency. I remember the app bug being mentioned too. I can't find it either. I've always told people not to use the app unless necessary, but from Reddit posters it is clear that there are quite a lot of sellers who try to conduct their entire business on the phone ("why can't I make a gig? I'm on mobile. What do you mean Fiverr doesn't allow you to make gigs on mobile? Wow, Fiverr is badword")

Ah, but you know who doesn't get ill and need to waste time recovering? AI, that's who! AI also doesn't talk back. Look at how neutered poor old Neo is.

Oh, that's a shame. And that whole thing about revisions is just saying "idk can't help" in 40 words when 3 would do. I should know, I'm a specialist at that writing style. But it does remind me of something I was thinking last night when I saw that there were going to be like, millions of webinars: Lots of opportunities to staff to contradict each other to different groups of webinar-attending sellers Unless the webinar is pre-recorded Unlike written communications, webinars cannot be easily shared/searched to highlight said differences Sellers should probably screen record the webinars AI can make transcripts easily The collected transcripts can then be investigated - again with AI - for inconsistencies. I'm sure Fiverr would approve, there's loads of use of AI in there. This probably will not happen though, since it requires a unified and collaborative approach from sellers and is probably not worth the results it will yield.

Here's the quote I was talking about. @arianelaurent, could you possibly share exactly what your SM said?

Yet a "Success Manager" tells a seller paying $40 a month for good advice that autocompleted orders are really not good and should be avoided. Who to believe? CS or SM? I'm going to lean slightly more on the SM since CS does tend to rely on template messages that don't answer the actual question but instead cover the broad subject instead. But who knows. I think automatically completed orders are assigned lottery numbers and once a day, the algorithm has a lottery ball thing and (relative to all other sellers with autocompleted orders that day) one lucky seller wins the jackpot. The jackpot is "very positive impact". The rest are then made into algorithmic shapes and put into one of these (virtual algo) machines to let the chips fall as they may. Obviously the algorithm is more complicated than this image, but this is just to give you an idea of how it works. HTH everyone!

I'm English, but I live in Greece. In the past few years, I've enjoyed these slogans springing up all over the historic town center near to me. The council presumably hasn't cleaned it up due to a lack of funds. The Greek just says "no to all tourists". The KKE (Greek Commmunist Part) symbols that usually surround these statements are unusually absent from the image. Oddly enough the actual sentiment for many Greeks appears to be the other way around, since tourists represent prosperity 🤔. Why post such things, anyway? Well, I noticed these slogans starting to pop up around the time Airbnb started to be reviled for pricing locals out of homes in their own towns as other locals purchased much of the stock to make mediocre short-term rentals. And then there's the whole problem with the EU. As for refugees, the island of Samos has what I shall very euphemistically describe as "camps" for the refugees. That very much explains this part of the message from the KKE. It's a complicated statement that's designed to shock tourists and consternate Greeks who have gotten fat from the profits of tourism and the PASOK years (read: Greek boomers), but ultimately one that falls flat and is unappealing to many who will read it, Greek or not. I could show nice pictures, but there's plenty of those on Google images, and they're all a bit boring. Needless to say, Greece has serious politico-socio-economic issues and there seems little hope of them being resolved in the near future due to the endless corruption of the nation's political elite. Next up in this series: Why the UK is a Barren Wasteland of Corrupt Misery Held Aloft by the Bloodies Riches of Colonialism. It's a bit of a banger, even if I say so myself.

Somewhere in all of this mess, one staff or bit of literature on the update says that success scores are relative to other sellers. It certainly points to how autocompleted orders ( = no customer-given metrics for scores) might now be damaging. (I don't think anyone has cleared up whether the relativity is across all sellers or limited to groupings e.g. all sellers in your level or success score/both)

Seems a little bit out of touch with a community that has been raging against the changes for the past few days. I wonder what exciting new things are planned for the second major release of the year. Here's the info about Fiverr Agencies if anyone is wondering. It's an enterprise marketplace feature: https://enterprise.fiverr.com/agencies/ It's... interesting, considering the types of agencies I've come to know in my 18-odd years as a freelancer. PROPER EDIT: Can Fiverr please have more information and blurbs on Enterprise features? I'm an Enterprise seller now and all I ever see is these landing pages. I barely have any idea how the feature works other than "I'm in a catalog" like some sort of prize ham. There's really no information about how any of it works for freelancers. It's called "transparency". Even the footer, or "junk drawer" of websites has nothing (obvious) for an enterprise freelancer to click on to learn more. Speaking of broken footers, a lot of the links on the footer of Fiverr Learn website are broken.

It most definitely is feedback manipulation. If Fiverr considers phrases like "If you're not happy/satisfied with this delivery, please let me know and I'll fix it up for you" to be feedback manipulation, then it should damn well consider that "asking previous happy buyers to inflate your metrics to feed the algorithm taking over Fiverr to get better rankings and ratings on an invisible algorithm" to be feedback manipulation. So Fiverr's cool with it when it suggests it, then they have the brass.. uh, monkeys to turn around and warn/disable seller accounts for what is a fairly tepid message and good customer service. And the only reason that is review manipulation (the seller message) is because bad sellers used it to beg for good orders. It's just like everything else on Fiverr: make AI punish everyone instead of actually fixing the problem with human brains and oversight. And when the AI makes problems, eh, break the TOS anyway. So much integrity. But that's how you become a billion dollar company, isn't it Fiverr?

Gamification. Fiverr is using it to benefit Fiverr at the expense of its sellers' health and it is absolutely avoiding any questions about it as it dials up the pressure with ever-more brutal systems leveraging a thoughtless AI.

I bet that's a Weatherspoons.

Fiverr has all the answers. They're just so transparent nobody can see them, much less understand them.

Oh, so Fiverr's success managers recommend that sellers practice feedback manipulation by contacting clients to give them good reviews? While dribbling on about the integrity of reviews and the pristineness of their transparency to everyone else? Alrighty then. I mean, I already knew that a lot of them must be doling out awful advice since I've seen a few too many "my SM told me to X and now I've been badthinged" posts on the subject. Then again, Fiverr does have a history of telling people that things will be fine before disabling their accounts because everything was not already (c/f VO Pete). Regardless of whether sellers should know better or not (they should), Fiverr never takes accountability for this. On a paid service. That people are paying for. To be successful. On the premium thing. As the only thing that really adds any value to the premium thing.

Not leaving an order = less metrics. It's probably bad, since if all other things are mostly equal, a seller who gets more reviews might get better XYZ from Fiverr for better performance. Because in the absence of data, there is an absence of information for the algorithm to work on. Off the top of my head, that could mean reduced visibility since the algo has "learned" that the seller with reviews is more pleasing to a customer, but there's probably a whole lot of other things that are impacted. But who knows, really. No metrics. That's the full extent of the issue. How bad it is depends on how badly the algorithm and the new levels and ratings system is designed. I rest my case.

If I were Kesha, I would simply skip to the last page and continue from there. Approximately 50% of everything over the weekend is OT nonsense anyway...

Who says the system isn't already live? The shining paragons of Transparency themselves?

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. 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 💯. 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.

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.

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.

It's nice to see some good news for once. I hope Fiverr will take a lot of lessons away from this disaster of a product release.