6 ms·

Upwork is Changing Again and What We Can Do About It

45 points by skeeper 10y ago

mooreds 10y ago
Network effects make this effort a bit quixotic, just like diaspora and ello, with respect to consumer faxing networks. But hopefully they'll give it a go, and maybe surprise this cynic.
- skeeper 10y ago
  With community support and the right people to create and maintain it, it's definitely possible.
cantagi 10y ago
Lets hope this is a race to the bottom for freelancing websites, rather than freelancers! Its also reminiscent of the opposition to Uber by London cab drivers: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/05/london-black-cab-drivers-app-uber-taxi https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/05/london-bl...
- skeeper 10y ago
  Thanks for sharing the article. I do hope it turns into a race to the bottom for freelancing websites and a race toward overall improvement and fairness.
zimbatm 10y ago
Why is a central authority controlling the market again ? What we need is interfaces for the customer and workers that can be matched together by a broker. It's probably quite hard to find the right interface but it would then benefit everyone. Here is a simpler example for a Uber-like implementation: * Taxis would be advertising their current position and whenever they they are free or not with their phone. * Potential customers would advertise their current location and where they want to go with their phone. * Broker services would match taxis with customers Obviously it's more complicated than that, there could be a reputation service associated to an account for example and your own algorithm running on your phone that chooses the combination of trust and pricing that you want.
- skeeper 10y ago
  It is using its size to control its market. We need regulation and protection for freelancers and a new breed of purposeful platforms that would serve as Upwork alternatives.
- kawera 10y ago
  Yes, protocols, not platforms.
  - skeeper 10y ago
    Could you explain more?
- skeeper 10y ago
  Could you explain more? Platforms like Upwork serve as interface or broker between customers and workers. Are you referring to something different?
  - zimbatm 10y ago
    Upwork is a monolith. It's a broker but also holds the developer and customer data. Competing brokers cannot enter the market without having to ask developers and customers to duplicate their data. If the developer had it's own service (like his personal website) that hold the list of services that he provides, his availability and general price. Then brokers could connect to this and match it with customer requests. Same on the other side, a customer should be able to submit his project proposal and let the various brokers pick it up and match the appropriate developers.
SarahMobius 10y ago
The new pricing structure halves my Upwork fee for most of the jobs I do. I had no time to comment on the complaints page though.
- skeeper 10y ago
  It's insane and inhumane for many freelancers. Many comments in the forum got deleted (as mentioned in the article). Freelancers see it happen all the time.
- ap46 10y ago
  The comments page proactively mentions adherence to community guidelines would be required while posting.
ccozan 10y ago
There is not necessarily a need for 100% community effort. What is needed a simple, decent service, with reasonable rates ( from 1% to 3% from a transaction ) and keeps up with the requests. Such a service could be run by a max 5 person company and I believe everyone could profit. I worked with Upwork and I liked the concept, but the implementation was a bit to complicated. With this changes, I really hope new such services will come up and fill this decency "void". The strategy of Upwork eludes me, since their strenght lies in the participants and alienating them is the last thing you want to do.
- skeeper 10y ago
  They seem to be alienating certain groups of freelancers deliberately.
  - aedron 10y ago
    Agreed - this new pricing structure hits hard for freelancers that do smaller jobs for many different clients, whereas for freelancers that bill larger amounts and have a longer client relationships, this will save them money (5% vs. 10% fee). I guess the small-jobs-for-new-clients-each-time take up a disproportionately large amount of support work for Upwork.
  - pvaldes 10y ago
    Ebay tried the same trick in the past, chasing off the platform thousands of small "unproductive" sellers. The problem is that this sellers were also specialized buyers spending money and many hours chasing rare items in Ebay AND showing their trophies to all their family and friends to see. Ebay lost not only some fine and loyal buyers, but also tons of great free advertising. In the end this lead to losing a lot of momentum as company, that probably helped to the raise of Alibaba. Freelancers are also numerous and cheap and Upwork definitely can afford to lose some of them, or even a lot of them, as long as keep the clients. But, as in the case of Ebay, the problem is that small contractors are also potential clients. Moreover, small clients add an interesting and very desirable collateral effect to the platform: A big increase in job diversity. If you alienate those people, you risk to lose some money, but also the outliers, very specialized freelancers interested in solving rare problems or offering less common experiences in many fields. As Ebay before promoting big asian sellers with a lot of transactions, It seems that Upwork is mostly interested in big clients with lots of work that needs to be done, posting again and again the same type of jobs. This could lead to: 1) The same few stablished freelancers being hired again and again. New freelancers eventually will lost interest and leave the platform, or will be swallowed by the sucessful freelancers, now stablished as agencies or farmers, and forced to work for less money. 2) ... Or there is always a different freelancer hired. This would point to a problem with quality of freelancers or clients (can't keep any freelancer for much time and need to repost the same job each month). 3) ... Or nobody is hired. A red flag that could be seen also as a worrying symptom of "ashley-madisonization" of the platform. I hope the best for the company, but it is unclear currently to me if this will be a smart move or a big mistake.
edoceo 10y ago
The alternative already exists, why isn't it being used?
- skeeper 10y ago
  Can you tell which alternatives? They are either similar or inferior to Upwork, or are still new and relatively unknown (and therefore there are not much jobs in their platform). It's a huge dilemma.
  - edoceo 10y ago
    Here is the newest one: http://bitkick.org/ My partner and I just kicked this off. We've got 6mo of runway and must acquire 100k freelancers in that time. Its chicken & egg, of course, we've decided to start on the talent side. We are also looking for freelancers to participate in market research interviews to help guide our build out.
ap46 10y ago
20% fee for work done for mostly one time clients?! That's just baloney.
- skeeper 10y ago
  It's a huge, big crap of a baloney. :)
projectramo 10y ago
One word: Non-profit. Okay, it is a hyphenated word.
- skeeper 10y ago
  I guess it may or may not be a non-profit. There are for-profit companies that do good, and maybe non-profits that do poorly.
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  It does strike me some kind of worker owned co-operative would suit this type of organisation.
  - skeeper 10y ago
    That's possible too. I think a few companies (in other industries) have taken this path.
  - projectramo 10y ago
    That might work. Or something like the NYSE. Lower trading costs, better transparency etc.
mooreds 10y ago
Maybe something like a REI or Vanguard model would work, where the company providing the service is a cooperative owned by the members?
- sanderjd 10y ago
  This is such a good idea that I'm surprised I haven't seen this model yet.
  - skeeper 10y ago
    Maybe because it's easier to launch something that is motivated by profit (for a few people) than anything else?
nfriedly 10y ago
Back when it was called elance, I was getting annoyed that it would bill clients automatically but then leave the money sit in my elance account - there was no way to automatically send income to a bank account. So I wrote a bot that logged in on my behalf every day and initiated a bank transfer if there was any money available. I don't believe this violated the ToS at the time, and Elance never said there was anything wrong with it. But once I posted it to the forums, my account was suspended within a day for a couple of silly things like having a reference to my personal website in one of my example images. I quit putting much faith in the company after that.
- skeeper 10y ago
  They seem to be getting some profit by keeping YOUR money on their accounts.
  - mooreds 10y ago
    It's called "float"--all kinds of companies use it. More here: http://www.fool.com/personal-finance/insurance/2006/12/05/insurance-industry-basics-float.aspx http://www.fool.com/personal-finance/insurance/2006/12/05/in...
    - skeeper 10y ago
      Thanks. I learned another cool jargon. Whatever "floats" their boat, I guess!
mooreds 10y ago
An aside. Anyone who is interested in marketplaces, whether their implementation, management, or value, should read "The Middle Man Economy" by Marina Krakovsky: http://marinakrakovsky.com/books/ http://marinakrakovsky.com/books/ This book was very helpful to me in understanding concretely how marketplaces and middlemen can actually have real tangible benefits (though, working for a marketplace startup now, and having worked for a real estate brokerage in the past, I have more than a passing familiarity with the value propositions of several types of middlemen). Alternatively, here's a podcast with the author: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/03/marina_krakovsk.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/03/marina_krakovsk.htm...
- skeeper 10y ago
  Could you share the name of your marketplace startup? Is it purpose driven? Thanks for sharing those links
skeeper 10y ago
Thanks to all those who made their comments here. I look forward to more comments in the coming hours and days! Let's keep this fire burning, so more people would see this!
phantom_oracle 10y ago
A lot of people are mentioning "let's build a clone that is better and will do us greater justice", but ask yourself, with 14 million entrenched users, how is building an upwork clone any different to "let's build a twitter/facebook clone"? The merger did precisely what they wanted it to do: Give a single player a dominant market-share. This single player will then engage in price-flooring practices until they've snatched up the largest market-share. They will then enforce their gradual fee and upselling strategies. This is no different to any other market where a monopoly exists. Internet companies like to claim they aren't monopolies by saying "just visit another site for their services" but entrenchment of the market is exactly what makes them monopolies. If a large-enough competitor came along (with big funding backing it), you'd soon see Upwork change tack and go back to price-flooring.
- madsaylor 10y ago
  >building an upwork clone I saw jobs like this in my feed at Upwork on daily basis
- tobltobs 10y ago
  I don't think you can compare the situation with twitter or facebook. Those are actually good at what they are doing. But upwork is such a crap (in my experience as a client, for freelancers it must be horrors) that a lot of people would jump ship as soon as there would be an alternative. But sadly all alternatives like guru or freelancer.com are as bad or even more (missing words to describe those clusterfucks) as upwork. Elance was at least a bit usable. Toptal might be an alternative but their boarding process looks a bit esoteric and is aiming at another targetgroups anyway.
  - skeeper 10y ago
    "But upwork is such a crap (in my experience as a client, for freelancers it must be horrors)... sadly all alternatives like guru or freelancer.com are as bad or even more" --- That's true!
- skeeper 10y ago
  We should not aim to create a clone. We should aim to make something right, fair, and better - the way it should've been done in the first place.
skeeper 10y ago
The Medium article above has gathered almost 4,000 views today and yesterday. We got amazing support. Getting close to 6,000 views. We should keep on sharing this with everyone out there!
skeeper 10y ago
This article is close to 6,000 total views. More support!

45 points by skeeper 10y ago

Network effects make this effort a bit quixotic, just like diaspora and ello, with respect to consumer faxing networks. But hopefully they'll give it a go, and maybe surprise this cynic.

skeeper 10y ago
With community support and the right people to create and maintain it, it's definitely possible.

cantagi 10y ago

Lets hope this is a race to the bottom for freelancing websites, rather than freelancers! Its also reminiscent of the opposition to Uber by London cab drivers: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/05/london-black-cab-drivers-app-uber-taxi https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/05/london-bl...

skeeper 10y ago
Thanks for sharing the article. I do hope it turns into a race to the bottom for freelancing websites and a race toward overall improvement and fairness.

zimbatm 10y ago

Why is a central authority controlling the market again ? What we need is interfaces for the customer and workers that can be matched together by a broker. It's probably quite hard to find the right interface but it would then benefit everyone. Here is a simpler example for a Uber-like implementation: * Taxis would be advertising their current position and whenever they they are free or not with their phone. * Potential customers would advertise their current location and where they want to go with their phone. * Broker services would match taxis with customers Obviously it's more complicated than that, there could be a reputation service associated to an account for example and your own algorithm running on your phone that chooses the combination of trust and pricing that you want.

skeeper 10y ago
It is using its size to control its market. We need regulation and protection for freelancers and a new breed of purposeful platforms that would serve as Upwork alternatives.
kawera 10y ago
Yes, protocols, not platforms.
- skeeper 10y ago
  Could you explain more?
skeeper 10y ago
Could you explain more? Platforms like Upwork serve as interface or broker between customers and workers. Are you referring to something different?
- zimbatm 10y ago
  Upwork is a monolith. It's a broker but also holds the developer and customer data. Competing brokers cannot enter the market without having to ask developers and customers to duplicate their data. If the developer had it's own service (like his personal website) that hold the list of services that he provides, his availability and general price. Then brokers could connect to this and match it with customer requests. Same on the other side, a customer should be able to submit his project proposal and let the various brokers pick it up and match the appropriate developers.

SarahMobius 10y ago

The new pricing structure halves my Upwork fee for most of the jobs I do. I had no time to comment on the complaints page though.

skeeper 10y ago
It's insane and inhumane for many freelancers. Many comments in the forum got deleted (as mentioned in the article). Freelancers see it happen all the time.
ap46 10y ago
The comments page proactively mentions adherence to community guidelines would be required while posting.

ccozan 10y ago

There is not necessarily a need for 100% community effort. What is needed a simple, decent service, with reasonable rates ( from 1% to 3% from a transaction ) and keeps up with the requests. Such a service could be run by a max 5 person company and I believe everyone could profit. I worked with Upwork and I liked the concept, but the implementation was a bit to complicated. With this changes, I really hope new such services will come up and fill this decency "void". The strategy of Upwork eludes me, since their strenght lies in the participants and alienating them is the last thing you want to do.

skeeper 10y ago
They seem to be alienating certain groups of freelancers deliberately.
- aedron 10y ago
  Agreed - this new pricing structure hits hard for freelancers that do smaller jobs for many different clients, whereas for freelancers that bill larger amounts and have a longer client relationships, this will save them money (5% vs. 10% fee). I guess the small-jobs-for-new-clients-each-time take up a disproportionately large amount of support work for Upwork.
- pvaldes 10y ago
  Ebay tried the same trick in the past, chasing off the platform thousands of small "unproductive" sellers. The problem is that this sellers were also specialized buyers spending money and many hours chasing rare items in Ebay AND showing their trophies to all their family and friends to see. Ebay lost not only some fine and loyal buyers, but also tons of great free advertising. In the end this lead to losing a lot of momentum as company, that probably helped to the raise of Alibaba. Freelancers are also numerous and cheap and Upwork definitely can afford to lose some of them, or even a lot of them, as long as keep the clients. But, as in the case of Ebay, the problem is that small contractors are also potential clients. Moreover, small clients add an interesting and very desirable collateral effect to the platform: A big increase in job diversity. If you alienate those people, you risk to lose some money, but also the outliers, very specialized freelancers interested in solving rare problems or offering less common experiences in many fields. As Ebay before promoting big asian sellers with a lot of transactions, It seems that Upwork is mostly interested in big clients with lots of work that needs to be done, posting again and again the same type of jobs. This could lead to: 1) The same few stablished freelancers being hired again and again. New freelancers eventually will lost interest and leave the platform, or will be swallowed by the sucessful freelancers, now stablished as agencies or farmers, and forced to work for less money. 2) ... Or there is always a different freelancer hired. This would point to a problem with quality of freelancers or clients (can't keep any freelancer for much time and need to repost the same job each month). 3) ... Or nobody is hired. A red flag that could be seen also as a worrying symptom of "ashley-madisonization" of the platform. I hope the best for the company, but it is unclear currently to me if this will be a smart move or a big mistake.

edoceo 10y ago

The alternative already exists, why isn't it being used?

skeeper 10y ago
Can you tell which alternatives? They are either similar or inferior to Upwork, or are still new and relatively unknown (and therefore there are not much jobs in their platform). It's a huge dilemma.
- edoceo 10y ago
  Here is the newest one: http://bitkick.org/ My partner and I just kicked this off. We've got 6mo of runway and must acquire 100k freelancers in that time. Its chicken & egg, of course, we've decided to start on the talent side. We are also looking for freelancers to participate in market research interviews to help guide our build out.

ap46 10y ago

20% fee for work done for mostly one time clients?! That's just baloney.

skeeper 10y ago
It's a huge, big crap of a baloney. :)

projectramo 10y ago

One word: Non-profit. Okay, it is a hyphenated word.

skeeper 10y ago
I guess it may or may not be a non-profit. There are for-profit companies that do good, and maybe non-profits that do poorly.
tonyedgecombe 10y ago
It does strike me some kind of worker owned co-operative would suit this type of organisation.
- skeeper 10y ago
  That's possible too. I think a few companies (in other industries) have taken this path.
- projectramo 10y ago
  That might work. Or something like the NYSE. Lower trading costs, better transparency etc.

mooreds 10y ago

Maybe something like a REI or Vanguard model would work, where the company providing the service is a cooperative owned by the members?

sanderjd 10y ago
This is such a good idea that I'm surprised I haven't seen this model yet.
- skeeper 10y ago
  Maybe because it's easier to launch something that is motivated by profit (for a few people) than anything else?

nfriedly 10y ago

Back when it was called elance, I was getting annoyed that it would bill clients automatically but then leave the money sit in my elance account - there was no way to automatically send income to a bank account. So I wrote a bot that logged in on my behalf every day and initiated a bank transfer if there was any money available. I don't believe this violated the ToS at the time, and Elance never said there was anything wrong with it. But once I posted it to the forums, my account was suspended within a day for a couple of silly things like having a reference to my personal website in one of my example images. I quit putting much faith in the company after that.

skeeper 10y ago
They seem to be getting some profit by keeping YOUR money on their accounts.
- mooreds 10y ago
  It's called "float"--all kinds of companies use it. More here: http://www.fool.com/personal-finance/insurance/2006/12/05/insurance-industry-basics-float.aspx http://www.fool.com/personal-finance/insurance/2006/12/05/in...
  - skeeper 10y ago
    Thanks. I learned another cool jargon. Whatever "floats" their boat, I guess!

mooreds 10y ago

An aside. Anyone who is interested in marketplaces, whether their implementation, management, or value, should read "The Middle Man Economy" by Marina Krakovsky: http://marinakrakovsky.com/books/ http://marinakrakovsky.com/books/ This book was very helpful to me in understanding concretely how marketplaces and middlemen can actually have real tangible benefits (though, working for a marketplace startup now, and having worked for a real estate brokerage in the past, I have more than a passing familiarity with the value propositions of several types of middlemen). Alternatively, here's a podcast with the author: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/03/marina_krakovsk.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/03/marina_krakovsk.htm...

skeeper 10y ago
Could you share the name of your marketplace startup? Is it purpose driven? Thanks for sharing those links

skeeper 10y ago

Thanks to all those who made their comments here. I look forward to more comments in the coming hours and days! Let's keep this fire burning, so more people would see this!

phantom_oracle 10y ago

A lot of people are mentioning "let's build a clone that is better and will do us greater justice", but ask yourself, with 14 million entrenched users, how is building an upwork clone any different to "let's build a twitter/facebook clone"? The merger did precisely what they wanted it to do: Give a single player a dominant market-share. This single player will then engage in price-flooring practices until they've snatched up the largest market-share. They will then enforce their gradual fee and upselling strategies. This is no different to any other market where a monopoly exists. Internet companies like to claim they aren't monopolies by saying "just visit another site for their services" but entrenchment of the market is exactly what makes them monopolies. If a large-enough competitor came along (with big funding backing it), you'd soon see Upwork change tack and go back to price-flooring.

madsaylor 10y ago
>building an upwork clone I saw jobs like this in my feed at Upwork on daily basis
tobltobs 10y ago
I don't think you can compare the situation with twitter or facebook. Those are actually good at what they are doing. But upwork is such a crap (in my experience as a client, for freelancers it must be horrors) that a lot of people would jump ship as soon as there would be an alternative. But sadly all alternatives like guru or freelancer.com are as bad or even more (missing words to describe those clusterfucks) as upwork. Elance was at least a bit usable. Toptal might be an alternative but their boarding process looks a bit esoteric and is aiming at another targetgroups anyway.
- skeeper 10y ago
  "But upwork is such a crap (in my experience as a client, for freelancers it must be horrors)... sadly all alternatives like guru or freelancer.com are as bad or even more" --- That's true!
skeeper 10y ago
We should not aim to create a clone. We should aim to make something right, fair, and better - the way it should've been done in the first place.

skeeper 10y ago

The Medium article above has gathered almost 4,000 views today and yesterday. We got amazing support. Getting close to 6,000 views. We should keep on sharing this with everyone out there!

skeeper 10y ago

This article is close to 6,000 total views. More support!