Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Things not to like about "Fiverr"

It's a nifty site, not a novel idea--having people offer small bits of work for a little money--but does bring it to the web more aggressively (being devoted to primarily just the one function). I'm talking about Fiverr, which lets one offer work for only five dollars.

Only, it takes twenty percent (at least: 1 for 5 dollars), which is before you pay out to Paypal (the only option for payments despite its rather notoriously negative history, and frequently frustrating demeanor toward or downright arbitrary abuse of users), and more importantly:

Fiverr only lets you input small amounts of text for descriptions etc.

You might say "so what, that keeps people from ranting!!!" But it also prevents one from specifying terms, or explaining sophisticated work, or pretty much anything else. It permits video of what you do, but who wants to make video if their bit is SEO? Is one supposed to point a camera at a screen? And how does that help with disclaimers, terms of service, and so forth.

Of course you might be thinking, "wait a minute, that just makes things complicated", but the proper response is "no, the lawyers and legal environment make things complicated"; any sort of transaction between two parties is going to be subject to somebody, and if you can't ensure to fully explain what you do and don't, what your terms are, what a customer has to agree to, then you might be asking for exposure to lawsuits.

And to make it even better, Fiverr disallows external links: so there is no getting around these limits by putting the terms elsewhere and referencing them. Yay!

Somehow this reminds me of the lawyer gal who deleted her Pinterest account for exposure to lawsuits passed-through to users by their terms of service. Maybe it's that these services care very little for their users in this area of consideration. Many little niche start-ups and operations are truly wonderful implementations of ideas, but in pursuit of many users they encourage people to be too simple for (not thinking about and acting with prudence in regards) their contextual realities as well.

1 comment:

N3lson said...

You forgot the fact that they have no listed address, email nor phone number. Scam anyone?