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A few problems with Freelancer from a buyer perspective: * If you post a project on something like C++, Android, iOS or web design you get about 10 generic bid

by octopus 13y ago

A few problems with Freelancer from a buyer perspective: * If you post a project on something like C++, Android, iOS or web design you get about 10 generic bids in the first minute. I suspect some coders use bots to bid on certain categories. This should be strictly prohibited. * Not sure how you can stop the coders to bid so low, when a guy bids $30 for 2 - 3 days of work the quality of his work can't be that great. Maybe enforcing some minimum bid limit ? I know this is a hard problem to solve. * Another problem that seems to keep the prices and quality down: coders that take a project and repost it with a much lower price. * A buyer should be forced to describe what he needs in the project description. Generic projects like Easy work, it can be done by an expert in a few hours. Details after you bid. should also be prohibited. These kind of projects keep the prices and the quality of the work down for everyone.

mattbarrie 13y ago
Hi Octopus Thanks for the feedback 1) Yes we are trying to crack down on the bid spam. However the marketplace is very liquid you will also almost always find that there is actually someone at the other end, so when you get 10 bids in 60 seconds if you start to chat there is a human at the other end. We get almost 1 million bids per month now. No other marketplace on the Internet comes close to liquidity (about 950k/mo now). This is great for finding people quickly and getting the right price for your project. 2) Well 5 billion people on this planet live on $8 day or less, I think you can't say just because someone is willing to work for 2-3 days for $30 they are automatically "bad". 3) Labour arbitrage is something we are looking at. It usually does not result in lower quality, quite the contrary, because the guys doing the arbitrage (flipping projects) need to retain a high reputation score or they will blow their accounts up and the business model will stop working. Right now they are acting as quality and customer service managers so they actually enhance the result for the end user. 4) Yes I absolutely agree, and we are looking into how this can be done better. Regards Matt

by octopus 13y ago

mattbarrie 13y ago

Hi Octopus Thanks for the feedback 1) Yes we are trying to crack down on the bid spam. However the marketplace is very liquid you will also almost always find that there is actually someone at the other end, so when you get 10 bids in 60 seconds if you start to chat there is a human at the other end. We get almost 1 million bids per month now. No other marketplace on the Internet comes close to liquidity (about 950k/mo now). This is great for finding people quickly and getting the right price for your project. 2) Well 5 billion people on this planet live on $8 day or less, I think you can't say just because someone is willing to work for 2-3 days for $30 they are automatically "bad". 3) Labour arbitrage is something we are looking at. It usually does not result in lower quality, quite the contrary, because the guys doing the arbitrage (flipping projects) need to retain a high reputation score or they will blow their accounts up and the business model will stop working. Right now they are acting as quality and customer service managers so they actually enhance the result for the end user. 4) Yes I absolutely agree, and we are looking into how this can be done better. Regards Matt