emmaki

Inspired by learning that the Resolution Center is full of bears, lions, and poisonous snakes and should be avoided by everyone except the Holy Spirit of St. Steven of Irwin, I thought it was time for us to all draw our feelings. Research shows that art therapy is a very effective medium for letting the bad feels out and the good feels back in. Since this is Fiverr, I'm not going to bother citing my sources (just following our fearless leaders' example). Instead, I made this beautiful piece in Canva which I am very proud of.

Wow, so the Resolution Center is now full of hidden hungry bears and ravenous lions? This update just keeps getting more and more transparent. I do not recall anyone mentioning the hungry bears and ravenous lions waiting to maul anyone seeking resolution.

@vickieito I need to go back to the UK to sort out some deathly dull official things that I was meant to do in 2020. I was unable to in the end due to The Event and then I was quite ill for a couple of years. This is really the first year that I can do it. I'm currently wondering if I should go the long, scenic route (car) or the air cigar route where I'm treated like a diseased cow. I'm leaning very strongly towards the road trip. In any case, it now looks like my unavoidable, already extremely dragged-out business in the UK might scupper my Fiverr account because... ...I don't know, the computer said no? It's also super annoying that I can't just road trip without having to consider Fiverr my passenger just to make sure my metrics and success scores and God knows what remain shining. Now, what do I keep saying about the adverse psychological impact of gamification? If this was a substance or any other thing I had to nervously keep checking or doing regularly, it would be called a badword, and recognized as a serious health problem by the medical community and Fiverr would come with health labels slapped all over it. As it is, it's a company so nothing will happen and we get to listen to the online equivalent of call center your are number 3545867624356786 in the line. Your call is important to us. Please keep holding. as some ghastly rendition of Beethoven's 5th on pan pipes tortures your ears. And then when you get to the front of the queue nobody wants to answer your questions anyway or tells you the wrong thing so you need to call again and again and again. I hope one day the world will rise up against the stain of corporate greed (in general) and destroy it before it destroys us.

I am totally fangirling over all of @anniejenkinson's posts right now.

Cheer up, you still look collaborative to me 🙂 (I'm sorry to hear this affected you)

Fiverr has serious internal communication issues that are spilling out all over the place with this launch. They know this. Various success managers have admitted it to sellers over the years. Is it really any surprise that this whole launch is a disorganized mess of hot garbage where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing? This is a site that wants to be trusted by millions of users as a place to do business. A place that can barely carry out its own business with the integrity, honesty, and trustworthiness that it demands of its users.

This is quite aggravating. I'd love to hear what Fiverr has to say about @anniejenkinson's posts. She raises some really good points that deserve an answer. As it is, all we have are buzzwords about transparency and an abject lack one of the most important criteria to achieve it: accountability. It really wouldn't hurt to just say...

Everyone forgets deaf people when it comes to discrimination 🙂

The success score is just metric-ception. The levels system still works as it always works. If you do something wrong within a 30 day period, you will be demoted unless you're a wizard or something. It's just been given a shiny new coat of paint. Lead paint. In a house made of asbestos. In a warzone.

The SP program does say that if you buy SP you'll get priority though. Unless it was changed recently. You may be right though, maybe the new system will thin out the herd of eligibles enough so that sellers won't need to buy SP. Although the RTO would definitely help in avoiding the minefield of buyers and their reviews, wouldn't you say? So, swings and roundabouts.

It is nice to see the admission that yes, the new system does indeed benefit cheap, high-volume gigs over big ticket, low volume gigs. I would like a response regarding Fiverr's continuing and deepened use of gamification in its new system, and whether staff have taken into account the potential ramifications on sellers mental and physical health. This is not a casino app, but a place where professionals work. Secondly, I would like a response as to why Fiverr has chosen to go down this route - making things harder and more stressful for low volume, high price sellers - at a time when its marketing strategy is targeting high value clients and moving away from cheaper market segments and looking for sellers to populate the catalogs that will serve them. At a time when the new system asks people about value for money and pushes prices down. Has Fiverr missed the memo that corporations were the biggest winners of the COVID epidemic, enjoying record profits as the rest of the world got poorer and continues to get poorer due to Cost of Living? Value for Money? Would it not make more sense to segment rating and leveling systems as the company did with the Pro, Certified, and Enterprise marketplaces? Or are these marketplaces to be stuffed full of low-scoring, low-level sellers per AI despite human staff recognizing that they are the platform's best sellers? Well, if they can, since the scores may promote less suitable sellers. It would not be the first time either; any system can be gamed easily by those determined enough to do it. Are sellers merely a disposable and replaceable asset full of metric points for internal use that can easily be burned and churned with no consideration for their health and livelihoods? It is quite staggering that this was launched with the "cancellation oversight". This mess and oversight is a direct result of Fiverr's own policies introduced ~4 years ago to prevent sellers from cancelling gigs to avoid bad reviews! Surely it is not that difficult for Fiverr to keep track of its own policies and integrate them with each new update? Because the company certainly manages to do it when it comes to its most toxic system: gamification.

So what's the difference, really? Apart from no more "bad luck, try harder next time" if your metric dips under 90% because e.g. you didn't respond to a Telespam on the 13th. For example. Do you think the new levels system was made by getting all the features of the old level system, writing them on lots of bits of paper, adding some new ideas on new bits of paper, and putting all these bits of paper into a hat? Then shaking the hat around a lot and everyone picks out a piece of paper and then when, I don't know, 20 "ideas" have surfaced, work starts on creating a brand new amazing system? Product Development - Now Available on Fiverr Pro from $100 Only!*

Sadly, Neo does not speak cat. Miaow is also really difficult to type lots of times and I'm not sure it's a real word anymore.

Before we fly to Tel Aviv, you might want to look at some of Fiverr's neighbors before going on a loud protest! Anyway, the analytics are awful, even the paid ones. A list of keywords where all the top keywords are HIGH HIGH HIGH tells us nothing. Even Google Ads gives broad numerical ranges (unpaid...) so you can do some analysis of the data. And in some verticals, there is no data. And for many verticals, a lot of the keyword data doesn't have LOW MEDIUM or HIGH, but "-", which I suppose means a complete absence of data. But what is it doing on a top keywords list? Did the database engineers not filter that out? I'm not a coder, but I know enough about spreadsheets and formula to know that this isn't a big ask in a SQL database. As for the other stuff, I am a low volume seller. It's cool that my gigs usually get more eyeballs than everyone else had apparently has a super-high conversion rate, but... what's the context? And if I'm making a handful of sales and others are making a lot more at cheaper prices, doesn't that mean I'm not getting a true overview of my place in the marketplace? I rarely look at the statistics, anyway. They are corrupt and broken. But they don't harm me, unlike the new, corrupt and broken rating and level system. They are essentially still building on top of a system that was introduced in 2010 (I think) with the launch of the platform, or at least very shortly after the launch of the platform. Nobody mistook Fiverr as a professional marketplace back then - it had sheep on the front page and gigs for men dancing in their underwear. Gamified level systems (which had zero impact other than being a fun thing) to help site growth. This new system keeps that - and it just turns it into a mind-bogglingly confusing mess of God knows what. But now Fiverr's grown up and wants to be a professional marketplace, but is using a gamified mess that punishes the natural low volume of big ticket hires, all while grading them on the same system of low price, high volume sellers. It makes no business sense at any level and it is the opposite of professional. Fiverr is simply trying to use automation and AI to control the marketplace. That's it. It wants to ditch the worst sellers, but keep the cheap gigs because it brings in a large portion of income (...and "conflict" problems) by dangling these hooks of levels and success and scores and whatever other shiny things. People run on hope. We all want to get to the next level. It's little more than psychological abuse when you combine gamified systems with people who are using Fvierr as a significant portion of their income. Worse, because Fiverr's own systems essentially dictate that you must put Fiverr first to succeed. It is such an ugly system. The last time I had huge issues with Fiverr was in Dec 2017/Jan 2018 when Fiverr turned its levels into the metric grading system that was in use until yesterday (with some small changes over the years. I had the exact same arguments then that I did now and at that time, Fiverr did not "listen" (i.e. have staff in forums talking with the community). Instead, this was all we got: https://blog.fiverr.com/post/level-systems-update-what-sellers-need-to-know Is what we have today any better, really? No! They made everything worse and they are repeating the same mistakes as 2018. Anyway, here's a collection of links that I found Googling "Fiverr Case Study". Pro-Tip: use -site:fiverr.com to eliminate the 1000000000 irrelevant (and usually 'on hold', poor quality) gigs that clutter up virtually every SERP related to Fiverr. There's also a post out there somewhere by the man who redesigned the (old?) analytics page (with the earnings and world map), but I cannot find it right now. However, it is interesting if anyone wants to have a go at finding it. I forgot to save the page... https://www.quantummetric.com/customers/case-study/fiverr/ https://www.colormatics.com/case-study/fiverr/ https://www.monalabs.io/case-study-fiverr https://orca.security/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Orca-Security-Case-Study-Fiverr.pdf https://www.hibob.com/case-studies/how-fiverr-uses-bob/ (internal employee HR stuff) Fiverr is run by machines, not people - and that is the choice of management, not staff.

After mysteriously disappearing from my inbox for ~2 weeks, Fiverr Neo has mysteriously reappeared. I asked him what he thought of The Event That Is Currently Distressing Everyone.

I doubt that passing on your comment will have anywhere near the impact it deserves, but we can only try. I agree with you completely that management is the issue here. As for CS, I have noticed in recent months that they have changed their template responses to include an initial sentence that says something like "I see/hear/whatever that you want to discuss [vague topic] before pasting in the rest of the template." Presumably this was done to reduce complaints that CS was sending generic templates that did not answer the question, but generic "personalized" templates on a generic template is not a solution. A better solution is hiring more support agents and providing them with better training. But like so many other businesses at the moment, Fiverr has joined the AI hype train and is using it to make so many bad decisions that really require human oversight. That is the core issue of Fiverr and a lot of business at the moment. Humans are being carved out of jobs and replaced by AI systems that are not yet advanced enough to replace humans when it comes to complex situations. AI doesn't have the capacity for human judgement. It's amazing at a lot of other things, granted. But this is not one of them. Management is responsible for everything here, and I lay the blame directly at their door. But are they listening? Or are our complaints being funnelled around endless department in a game of Chinese whispers until the most sanitized version reaches management? I find it hard to blame the staff of Fiverr who, like us, are doing their job. They are as much victims of bad calls and business implementations as sellers are, only they are blessed by the relative steadiness of employment paychecks and regulations, whereas freelancers as contractors are not. But I don't see management coming down to the trenches to talk with the soldiers. We're all on the front line shouting at each other instead. All that's happening right now on the forum is that staff are reading and compiling notes and checking boxes to pass onto God knows who and ad infinitum, to be processes by another AI (probably) until, like I said, the sanitized report is delivered to management. Only the smallest of tweaks will be made to conform with whatever that report says. And that report, more than anything else, will be focused on investors and profit making. We are all but cogs in mammon's machine. NEW IDEA: Let's all fly to Tel Aviv and stage a loud and angry protest outside Fiverr HQ! Or whatever Fiverr HQ is nearest to us. A co-ordinated, global protest would be a good way to attract media headlines and bring to the fore the problems of the gig economy once again.

From what I remember it's a daily thing now, there are no monthly fundays, because every day is Fiverr Funday now. This is "tempered" by having probation periods (I don't recall how long they are or if itwas disclosed) so people can improve their performance. Given that we're currently on a 30-day probation period, my guess is that this might be a case of the Emperor's New Clothes; i.e. the probation period is 30 days, so your demotion is delayed for a month. Or, as we might say if we were all baguette-wielding, chainsmoking French people wearing a wreath of garlic to fend of Fiverr and ze Engleesh, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Don't forget the beret and the long, exasperated sigh of disgust.

I left that out of my analysis last night 🙂 In any case, the gentleman in the image does not appear to be very well-endowed...

Oh no, I've been rumbled. Please don't tell everyone else.

I think the gig thing is easy to explain Eliminate low quality gigs Amplify TRS gig presence "Elevate" overall marketplace Make Fiverr look more "high quality" without addressing actual mass marketplace issues It's just been implemented in the lazy, shoddy, and thoughtless way that the rest of the changes have.

I would like to know about the location violation thing, as I have some vague plans - now buried under the deepest of ice - to travel Europe next summer while working. Does the New Fiverr mean that digital nomads are now persona non grata at Fiverr? Please excuse me for daring to dream of living a life that doesn't put Fiverr at the center of it.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas girl! I am so tired of seeing "research says" with absolutely zero citation. Research that isn't backed up by anything I can find on Google Scholar. A company that repeatedly tells sellers about its transparency WITHOUT citing their sources is NOT being transparent. This is basic research 101!

Nothing is going to happen - a few minor tweaks will be made to the system to reflect "listening to the community", primary issues will be left unloved, ignored, and unaddressed, and the world will continue. The real solution to this is for the vast majority of sellers to down tools and close their profile for 1, 2, 3 months. That will never happen, so this will. Simple math and the biggest issue with the gig economy exposed: the complete and utter lack of worker unionization, stakeholder...ing?, or protections. Fiverr also notes that this becoming a thing is a threat to their business model in their investing things, btw. Among other interesting bits.

You mean this bit? Perhaps we should all start using those ChatGPT templates that are being thrown at us by Fiverr staff to help us communicate like a ninja rockstar? However, this does come with the potentially erroneous assumption that the templates have been crafted with explicit reference to the internal criteria of the AI, rather than just being generated to meet a content production schedule. In which case those templates are not optimized and potentially dangerous for seller profiles. I mean, Fiverr does have a track record introducing things as wonderful which are in fact nightmares on steroids, so my personal weighting of the situation is that the templates are likely to hinder rather than help. Not least because buyers have already noticed roboseller speak. I think sellers would benefit from buying ChatGPT Plus to create a GPT assistant that is an expert in their business, feeding it with the entirety of the Fiverr TOS, Help Center, and other bits and bobs and also a whole library on NLP and semantic texts. It would also be a good idea to test ChatGPT output on Neo, since I would assume that Neo's inner workings tie in with the AI algorithms. We can ignore the buyer and human communication/connection of course. This is completely irrelevant to our primary task of staying on top of Fiverr's demanding systems so we can attract more buyers. However, smarter people will also make sure to add a human touch (to avoid the roboseller impression) without destroying the semantic structures. Google has a useful free tool for that. Such a pity Fiverr won't just let us leave our whole account to robots, really. It brings to mind a familiar phrase: "Do as I say, not as I do..." As for the elephant standing behind me, I call him Little Hypocrisy because he's so huge, just like Little John, and it's a very funny joke. I don't know why he's called hypocrisy though. It's probably just a weird foreign name.

I have never liked the Fiverr inbox. Yesterday: 5 Telespams 2 Hi people, one of whom sent 6 his before I said hi. After I said hi, they said 'gee' and 'how are you' so spamblocked them 2 foreign messages (Italiano and Deutsch) 1 academic request 1 mildly interesting request with an impossible deadline 1 actually interesting query from a brand that we all know and love etc etc etc. I would like to just be able to ignore 99% of messages in my inbox. Thus, keeping the gig open was a way to get work and just QR-ignore inbox messages and hope for the best with orders. It's not like I did badly with that system, which itself was an upgrade on the pre-Levels system of "completely ignore the inbox". I just canceled inappropriate orders and refused to cancel on bad buyers (they tended not to leave reviews, which I like to put down to the scathing reviews I have left in the past). Which didn't happen very often. But I was also out of the office for large parts of the last 2 years which has, ironically, helped in its own little way. RTO does mean that I'll never open another order and get that sinking feeling again though, so that's nice.