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Comment by sampk | Hacker News Reader

Not directly related but shit like this really scares me away from these sites and make me lose some faith in humanity (look at the client's history): https://www.odesk.com/o/jobs/job/Artist-Needed-for-Home-Page...

He's basically selling ratings. 147 jobs — which would usually cost you at least $200+ each — done for $829 total!

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Surely that guy isn't selling ratings, as he's the client so he's the guy paying the low fees - presumably to get work (just cheap work), otherwise why would he spend $829 just to give contractors ratings. (Unless there's more going on than meets the eye, for example behind the scenes he's selling the chance to get a positive rating for more than he pays on the site.)

Or the company via a different means is paying this "person" more money than he is spending, to make it look legitimate -- the only loss then is the fee (%) that Elance / oDesk takes, which further incentivizes Elance / oDesk to allow this behaviour, though that is minor in comparison to having a lot of "high quality" / highly rated contractors on their platform.

Yeah. Elance / oDesk aren't incentivized to prevent this behaviour. They want a site that looks busy, and full of "high-quality" / highly rated contractors.

They could easily allow for filters to weed, though instead they allow for details to be hidden.

Having the ability to see everybody that scored in the top 5% for [specific skill] would be nice. Maybe an email to garyeswart@odesk.com is in order.

You can see the top 10% if you're logged in.

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