It's always been obvious that freelancer had no test platform and that they would simply push releases to production and wait for things to break, and then maybe fix them.
The most interesting lesson from this was that this attitude has no apparent downside. Users either don't care, don't even notice, or sadly, may have no choice given that there are not many sites that fill this niche.
The company went public a few years ago, investors have no clue as to what's under the hood, and tbh it doesn't seem to matter much.
It's interesting to see what freelancer is doing now that they are accountable. Me, I think it will be more of the same.
Last time I looked, unless this is an hourly rate job, this is not possible. (Hourly rate is free form) You have three or four fields, each 200 char max.
Can't really do much more than say "I can do this" and draw attention to your reviews if you have any.
For me this is one of the many red flags on this site. If you're very focused then you can make it work, but for common garden jobs, not so much.
1. way too many details not revealed in this story, so difficult to make any kind of assessment of the review.
2. my freelancer experience dates back to the days of getafreelancer and I have way more reviews that the reviewer, so I think I can comment with my take on freelancer.
3. I have never had a issue with freelancer in regards to payment, either as a freelancer or as job poster. This is the one and only thing that they do well.(That said everything else is pretty poor)
4. I've had a couple of disputes there, mainly due to the ignorance of job poster on how payment is finally made, and this has always been settled in my favor.
Enough of the nice stuff.
Freelancer is a subscription site disguised as a job portal. IMO they don't give a shit about either the freelancers or the project owners, all they want to do is collect the subscriptions, which I think is not a bad business model. They have to go through the motions of giving a damn, but everything besides collection and disbursement is done on a shoestring and it shows.
Freelancer is the anti-pattern of how to do things online. They have earned a place as one of the classic a case studies on how not to do things on the web.
Their web site sucks in just about every respect, speed, not so much. Test environment = live site. so when they roll out changes, guess how that goes. Might have changed recently, I hope so, after all they have this wonderful pool of resources to draw on.
Their search engine is precious, search on "automate", fine, now search on "automated", and now on "automatic", and so on...
I estimate that less than 10% of job postings actually end up as actual projects. Now and then I tinker with the idea of monitoring their projects and collecting actual statistics, but then I realize that I have better things to do.
Job bids - fields are limited in to 200 character length, and then they have the cheek to send you an email saying basically, "hey, your bid sucks, you need to fix it"
You have no way to vet either bidders or job posters, used to be possible, but they took that feature away.
I'm receiving fake job offers which look like deliberate traps for ignorant subscribers. Can't prove that, but all the accounts are a day or so old for stupid amounts $10, or so. If you're desperate for any lead and click on Accept, hey look, Freelancer just deducted their $5 commission. This has been going on for a couple of months now.
I can go on, but that's enough. The fact is that the site is up and running and generating income. There must be thousands of subscribers hoping to find a career via the platform and freelancer is milking them.
TL/DR - Stay away, the site can be useful, but probably not for you unless you are v careful.
It's always been obvious that freelancer had no test platform and that they would simply push releases to production and wait for things to break, and then maybe fix them.
The most interesting lesson from this was that this attitude has no apparent downside. Users either don't care, don't even notice, or sadly, may have no choice given that there are not many sites that fill this niche.
The company went public a few years ago, investors have no clue as to what's under the hood, and tbh it doesn't seem to matter much.
It's interesting to see what freelancer is doing now that they are accountable. Me, I think it will be more of the same.