Jump to content

This Place Needs a Serious Cleanup!


cyaxrex

Recommended Posts

My God. I rarely venture into the search unless I am creating new gigs. Whenever I do, though, I am always shocked at how dire things are becoming.

First and foremost, this is a huge bug:

565317458_Screenshotat2018-09-2820-08-43.png.907ab8441436e1ed9b248fb9745d2e9b.png

For some reason, after searching for a service, it is not possible to filter results by articles and blog posts. For some reason, ‘All Categories’ and ‘Articles & Blog Posts’ display together on initial searches. Clicking Articles & Blog Posts does nothing. Instead, if users want to filter by articles and blog posts, they first need to click to filter by something else (like web programming), before clicking back to articles and blog posts.

This is a huge platform usability flaw. It leads to searches being chocked full of irrelevant gigs. At the same time, this doesn’t look like a bug to end users. In this case, I will bet money that users end up scrolling forever through irrelevant junk before just giving up.

Please, fix this. Logos, videos, etc, appearing in searches for written content creators is hugely annoying.

Secondly, let’s talk about copyright fraud

So far, I have found three sellers using my own created media to advertise their gig. I want to know how this happens? I recently went to change my profile picture. Fiverr flagged my new picture as non-original content and reverted my image back. I was confused about this until I realized that I had accidentally clicked the wrong file when going to upload my image.

To be honest, I was impressed! 🙂 If Fiverr could tell instantly that an image is not unique, this would surely mean that copyright fraud should be decreasing. Right? Well… Apparently, this doesn’t work the same way with gig images. - It should!

Lastly, Fiverr desperately needs some kind of real 💩 seller safeguards

I’m truly sorry if this upsets some people. However, the quality on Fiverr seems to be going downhill fast.

When I create new gigs, I spy on the gigs on the first page of search results and gigs which are selling well, to see what fellow sellers are offering. In the early days, I used to flick through gigs and think, “pretty good idea” or “I wonder how they do that,” or “mmhh… interesting.” Now I’m flicking through gigs thinking OMG! HOW ARE THESE PEOPLE EVEN HERE AND SELLING ANYTHING?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a strict perfectionist. However, when searching for things like cryptocurrency article curation, I’m finding appallingly presented article writing gigs on the first page of the search. In gig descriptions these include jumbled up, poorly worded sentences like:

"I have well knowledge about cryptocurrency."

People like this should not be getting exposure on the first page of the search, or be having rising talent and other encouraging badges slapped on them! It’s insane!

REAL Problems Which Need Addressing ASAP

Things like messed up search filtering need to be fixed before things like imaginary problems with the review system are fixed.

As for basic gig quality, I appreciate that it is not possible for Fiverr to scrutinize every gig on a case by case basis. However, I do believe that there should be some kind of 💩 seller safeguards put in place. The reason for this is simple:

I’ve rabbited on about this a bit, but I was the first seller on Fiverr to offer real estate marketing videos. This was an insanely lucrative niche. Then people flogging copyright infringed Envato templates started flooding the market. I was outpriced and ended up standing in a sea of hundreds of such gigs. Legitimate sellers can’t compete against those odds. It’s a mathematical impossibility.

What did I do? I took that part of my business off Fiverr.

This seems to be happening now with my cryptocurrency article gig. The search has become saturated with cheap and nasty sellers (sorry it’s not all of them but it’s a lot), and my sales have started dropping accordingly. In the same period, this part of my business has become the best performing off-Fiverr.

In short, without any real quality control, legitimate sellers can end up being buried in the search by anyone who can regurgitate a bad gig description and stick a picture of a pretty bird on it.

The Solution

As much as I hate the culture of gig flagging, I think flagging could be the way to go with this. If I see a seller on the first page who says: “me super SEO writer with big client i will create write incredable contents for you! buy now because you will be first on google!” I feel embarrassed even to be here. (Not a real description btw.)

Sadly, a lot of buyers on Fiverr are resellers who have no idea how to gauge real quality. All they care about is rock-bottom prices. These people see word counts and not sentence structures. They hit up sellers who write like they are vomiting dictionary pages, and steadily these sellers are favored by the Fiverr search algorithm. (By selling lots of cheap nasty content quickly.)

My personal belief is that sellers should be able to flag and report such gigs for poor quality. However, I do not believe that the present reporting feature should be used until there are rock-solid safeguards in place to prevent abuse.

Possible safeguards could include:

  • The inability for sellers to flag other (individual seller) gigs more than once.
  • Absolutely no automated action would be taken when a gig is flagged. Action would only be taken if an accountable CS person deems complaints legitimate
  • Only sellers who have been selling on Fiverr for 1-year or more would be allowed to report gigs
  • Reports would not take the form of multiple choice selections of complaints. Sellers would have to word exactly why they feel a reported gig is not suitable for the marketplace
  • All sellers would have to agree to a disclaimer when reporting gigs, stating that if complaints are found invalid, they will be banned from reporting any other gig for 6-months or more
  • Buyers should not be allowed to report gigs unless they have 6-months or more of active buying history

At present, Fiverr seems to be rolling out lots of trust and safety features which invite abuse. Because of this, legitimate sellers like myself are predisposed not to use these. The above kind of framework would change this and help clean up Fiverr.

In the meantime, please for the love of God, fix the article and blog post category filter.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Seems I am missing lot of things going on lately, but I am overloaded with work right now to participate in the forum, though I have an article regarding the rating and review systems, their types and features, but I do not have the time to post that and follow the thread. I may post it if I get some spare time.

Yes, what you say is true. I wrote about that in “A Personal view…” post with a screenshot showing that only a 25% valuable gigs actually appeared in main category, but I really did more tests, and all of them where plagued with no authority priority, just results heavily influenced by Gig descriptions. Some sellers just spam keywords in their descriptions, and it works, making them appear on top big searches, while their real value is low.

I think the search engine is the core of the system, and must be really complicated. I really envy those that have the opportunity to work with such big amount of data. Such power in their hands…

The report gigs option to be manually reviewed you propose is very nice. For example, I found childs below 13 years old that have gigs published, which is against site policies. They even say that in their gigs descriptions, even in this forum some published their gigs and say “hey I am 9 years old”. How those can be approved? If we go to Fiverr TOS, we find this:

" Children Under the Age of 13

Our Site is not intended for children under 13 years of age. No one under age 13 should provide any personal information to or on the Site. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. Parents and guardians should at all times supervise their children’s activities. If we learn we have collected or received personal information from a child under 13, we will delete that personal information. If you believe we might have any information from or about a child under 13, please contact us at [legal@fiverr.com]"

As we have Fiverr Pro, let’s have Fiverr Kids. But when you are trying to offer business grade services, I don’t think having kids around benefits anyone. We are professionals. At least, a lot of us do REAL business.

So, if we are sooo concerned about buyer’s experience… why are some key factors not addressed? They are absolutely uncontrolled, like kids, sellers that just copy other gigs, just registered sellers on frontpage, and so on.

There are tons of things Fiverr can do to improve buyers experience, while improving also sellers experience. So many things…

PS: Happy birthday @eoinfinnegan!!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My God. I rarely venture into the search unless I am creating new gigs. Whenever I do, though, I am always shocked at how dire things are becoming.

First and foremost, this is a huge bug:

Screenshot%20at%202018-09-28%2020-08-43

For some reason, after searching for a service, it is not possible to filter results by articles and blog posts. For some reason, ‘All Categories’ and ‘Articles & Blog Posts’ display together on initial searches. Clicking Articles & Blog Posts does nothing. Instead, if users want to filter by articles and blog posts, they first need to click to filter by something else (like web programming), before clicking back to articles and blog posts.

This is a huge platform usability flaw. It leads to searches being chocked full of irrelevant gigs. At the same time, this doesn’t look like a bug to end users. In this case, I will bet money that users end up scrolling forever through irrelevant junk before just giving up.

Please, fix this. Logos, videos, etc, appearing in searches for written content creators is hugely annoying.

Secondly, let’s talk about copyright fraud

So far, I have found three sellers using my own created media to advertise their gig. I want to know how this happens? I recently went to change my profile picture. Fiverr flagged my new picture as non-original content and reverted my image back. I was confused about this until I realized that I had accidentally clicked the wrong file when going to upload my image.

To be honest, I was impressed! 🙂 If Fiverr could tell instantly that an image is not unique, this would surely mean that copyright fraud should be decreasing. Right? Well… Apparently, this doesn’t work the same way with gig images. - It should!

Lastly, Fiverr desperately needs some kind of real 💩 seller safeguards

I’m truly sorry if this upsets some people. However, the quality on Fiverr seems to be going downhill fast.

When I create new gigs, I spy on the gigs on the first page of search results and gigs which are selling well, to see what fellow sellers are offering. In the early days, I used to flick through gigs and think, “pretty good idea” or “I wonder how they do that,” or “mmhh… interesting.” Now I’m flicking through gigs thinking OMG! HOW ARE THESE PEOPLE EVEN HERE AND SELLING ANYTHING?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a strict perfectionist. However, when searching for things like cryptocurrency article curation, I’m finding appallingly presented article writing gigs on the first page of the search. In gig descriptions these include jumbled up, poorly worded sentences like:

"I have well knowledge about cryptocurrency."

People like this should not be getting exposure on the first page of the search, or be having rising talent and other encouraging badges slapped on them! It’s insane!

REAL Problems Which Need Addressing ASAP

Things like messed up search filtering need to be fixed before things like imaginary problems with the review system are fixed.

As for basic gig quality, I appreciate that it is not possible for Fiverr to scrutinize every gig on a case by case basis. However, I do believe that there should be some kind of 💩 seller safeguards put in place. The reason for this is simple:

I’ve rabbited on about this a bit, but I was the first seller on Fiverr to offer real estate marketing videos. This was an insanely lucrative niche. Then people flogging copyright infringed Envato templates started flooding the market. I was outpriced and ended up standing in a sea of hundreds of such gigs. Legitimate sellers can’t compete against those odds. It’s a mathematical impossibility.

What did I do? I took that part of my business off Fiverr.

This seems to be happening now with my cryptocurrency article gig. The search has become saturated with cheap and nasty sellers (sorry it’s not all of them but it’s a lot), and my sales have started dropping accordingly. In the same period, this part of my business has become the best performing off-Fiverr.

In short, without any real quality control, legitimate sellers can end up being buried in the search by anyone who can regurgitate a bad gig description and stick a picture of a pretty bird on it.

The Solution

As much as I hate the culture of gig flagging, I think flagging could be the way to go with this. If I see a seller on the first page who says: “me super SEO writer with big client i will create write incredable contents for you! buy now because you will be first on google!” I feel embarrassed even to be here. (Not a real description btw.)

Sadly, a lot of buyers on Fiverr are resellers who have no idea how to gauge real quality. All they care about is rock-bottom prices. These people see word counts and not sentence structures. They hit up sellers who write like they are vomiting dictionary pages, and steadily these sellers are favored by the Fiverr search algorithm. (By selling lots of cheap nasty content quickly.)

My personal belief is that sellers should be able to flag and report such gigs for poor quality. However, I do not believe that the present reporting feature should be used until there are rock-solid safeguards in place to prevent abuse.

Possible safeguards could include:

  • The inability for sellers to flag other (individual seller) gigs more than once.
  • Absolutely no automated action would be taken when a gig is flagged. Action would only be taken if an accountable CS person deems complaints legitimate
  • Only sellers who have been selling on Fiverr for 1-year or more would be allowed to report gigs
  • Reports would not take the form of multiple choice selections of complaints. Sellers would have to word exactly why they feel a reported gig is not suitable for the marketplace
  • All sellers would have to agree to a disclaimer when reporting gigs, stating that if complaints are found invalid, they will be banned from reporting any other gig for 6-months or more
  • Buyers should not be allowed to report gigs unless they have 6-months or more of active buying history

At present, Fiverr seems to be rolling out lots of trust and safety features which invite abuse. Because of this, legitimate sellers like myself are predisposed not to use these. The above kind of framework would change this and help clean up Fiverr.

In the meantime, please for the love of God, fix the article and blog post category filter.

there are rock-solid safeguards in place to prevent abuse.

Yeah, that’s never happening. If Fiverr cared about stuff like this then it would’ve already happened. It’s not like Fiverr hasn’t gone through its fair share of controversies explicitly because of their lack of management.

P.S

Happy birthday @eoinfinnegan! You’re one step closer to becoming a dashing old man.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...