
Ask HN: What can be done about freelance sites? - anovikov
Hi!<p>What in the existing freelance sites seem wrong to you, a problem needing solving which is a market opportunity?<p>Now in general, this market seem to be built in a way that prevents people&#x27;s progress at every stage: starting out, growing as a professional, starting as a business, growing as a business.<p>At the begining we have a chicken and egg problem when nobody wants to hire you even if you are brilliant, until you have a stellar profile with a lot of experience - and lowering price doesn&#x27;t really work, because the lower your price the higher the competition.<p>When the freelancer is past that stage, he has a problem of low rates in his history which makes him look like cheap labor, rising rates is very difficult.<p>And finally - it is difficulty to grow beyond an individual freelancer: many clients, for subjective reasons, don&#x27;t want a company&#x2F;agency, even those who definitely need one.<p>On the customer&#x27;s side, it is a problem of fakes, and false impression of very low rates, which arise from a large number of profiles that bid with super low bids, but never get a job.<p>So, no surprise first advice to freelancers is usually &#x27;avoid freelance sites&#x27;!<p>I fully understand that this is very hard since it is a two-sided market: to get freelancers you need clients and vice versa. But i think it is possible to make something to disrupt this market.<p>That is the biggest problem here? Anything you can think of on how to improve the market?<p>Thanks for inputs!
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borplk
Freelancer sites seem to end up in a hostile 3-way fight. Customers, clients,
and the middle man each one trying to screw the other two groups.

And it gets worse with scale because it turns into a race to the bottom, the
good players get lost and lumped together with the bad ones you can't
spot/differentiate them among the sea of crap.

First some sites like Elance/Upwork/oDesk/Freelancer came along and they
abused their popularity more and more every day.

Upwork has gone completely insane in the past few years treating freelancers
like dirt.

Then from there you get another generation of sites that basically capitalised
on "we are the good guys trust us" marketing.

They do some higher end marketing. Often (effectively) saying "yeah those
cheap Upwork guys are terrible ... just try us we are different".

They also tend to be hollow, just a shiny store front, but in principle still
the same troubling incentives are at play.

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randomerr
Sounds like opposite side of a thread I was involved in recently:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15898460](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15898460)

I really don't think there is anything that can be done just short of a
verification system like what Twitter use to do. You had to scan and email
your driver's licence or state ID and send it to them. So you would need
'social security number' for job sites. I guess a Facebook, Twitter or Google
login might work.

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anovikov
My ideas here revolve around enabling and promoting horizontal links between
freelancers. When advanced ones legally outsource to n00bs, taking full
responsibility for their jobs, as if it was done by themselves, and allowing
money to be split in proportion invisible to clients. That is still not a
finalized idea.

