I'm another current gigster, using a throwaway because I want to avoid retaliation. I'm posting this because Im really frustrated and about to leave gigster.
I just want to confirm everything you wrote there. Gigs dried up around october, meaning devs/designers that didnt have tons of PM contacts simply havent had any gigs for the past few months. This was raised multiple times, and HQ always promises to do something -but nothing ever comes of it, there's absolutely no info on how much work is in the pipeline, no transparency, nothing.
Then, as you say, everyone outside of HQ and pms has no way to apply for gigs. PMs guard this furiously and this leads to some pretty nasty interactions, completely unprofessional ones - pms being rude, brusque, dismissing, or keeping info from a dev.
One time I signed on a gig and only then did the pm tell me that I was going to be doing on-call duty. This wasnt factored in the payout, so I would make essentially 20$/h over the course of the gig. I tried to raise this issue with the Delight Team (internal customer service) but apart from taking 2 weeks to even get back to me - nothing was done, I was just removed from the gig.
Also, ditto on late payouts. A lot of people have had issues like this, payouts not going out for weeks. It's been a work in progress since early last year and HQ kept on promising stuff "yeah, we fixed this, itll be good now". At least theyve fixed their contractor-facing site, which was experiencing problems all throughout 2016.
Finally, the cherry on top - gigster, like other shops that hire contractors, is required to send a 1099 to the contractor and to the IRS by January 31st. As you can imagine, they've kinda failed here too. A lot of people didn't get their 1099s and a lot of people are reporting errors on their 1099s. It looks like they outsourced this out and whoever did it messed up transferring data from contractors' W9 into the 1099.