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> I agree that it's harmful to society to create "marketplaces" where workers are more free to undercut each other on price. Wouldn't designer/developer freela

• smacktoward 12y ago
  Not necessarily, as within traditional means of winning business many of them compete very successfully on other merits, such as quality of work, reputation or knowledge of a particular domain/sector. It's only when you build an online marketplace that this kind of race to the bottom emerges, because the vast majority of participants on both sides will be completely unknown to each other. So the few objective signals the marketplace offers, like price, become the only means available for party A to evaluate party B. It's possible to imagine a sort of eBay-style reputation system offsetting this; but only in part, because by definition the people who will be competing in a blind marketplace are the ones who have the least reputational capital. (If they had a reputation, they'd be using it to get clients, not bidding on lowest-common-denominator work.) So the best guarantee that would offer would be that the person/company you're looking at is the "best of the worst," so to speak.
  • humanrebar 12y ago
    > It's only when you build an online marketplace that this kind of race to the bottom emerges, because the vast majority of participants on both sides will be completely unknown to each other. So the few objective signals the marketplace offers, like price, become the only means available for party A to evaluate party B. Except that creative freelancers usually post some sort of online portfolio, which seems like an extremely fair thing to judge a candidate by, all things considered.