New system aimed primarily at matching newer sellers with buyers
So now it seems I have to wait two hours before I can bid for a job. This is extremely unfair. Not only do experienced creatives/designers have to compete with an unfair playing field, ie people offered to do a job for £10 when it is clearly worth £100, we are now not allowed to bid for jobs as soon as they appear on PPH. What kind of system is this?!
Awful. Unfair. Unprofessional. Discriminatory.
Regards
C. Howe
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@ David
In regards to the question about the social media likes, I can say this much:
"whilst at the same time PPH is active in undermining the authority of FB by selling the very 'likes' that are destroying customer confidence in the system?"
Until there is an actual protocol from the likes of companies such as Facebook and Twitter that attempt to remove the ability to add likes to ones profile, the option to purchase such a service will remain. Facebook for instance allows up to a certain amount of likes to be added to an individual profile and has recently added certain filtering options in order to avoid spam. The same goes for the Federal Trade Commission Policies on these standards. There is a large number of freelancers that make a legitimate living selling these services and are breaking no actual law. We also have filters in place to make sure that sellers that are producing low quality or non existent likes are removed from the site and there is a threshold of how many likes a seller can offer as for it to be within legal boundaries. There are thousands of articles online on just this topic and many opinions that can go with it.
We will always comply with any information provided for illegal work being offered by any of our users when and if this is made known to us.
p.s. I have asked our social media manager to make sure that the proofreading process is better looked at for spelling mistakes. If you have an email that shows such errors, I would love to hear from you in this or any forum so that i can take direct action from my side.
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That's a rather disappointing view of FB and other 'likes'.
FB likes imply a level popularity and encourage others to join a site because it seems popular.
Artificially bumping up the number of facebook likes by paying money is essentially a low-level form of fraud - misleading visitors. I am sorry to see PPH aiding and encouraging such actions.
Before you say PPH doesn't encourage such action, I'll suggest that PPH dropping hourlies regularly in my mailbox offering such services, is as encouraging as it gets.
PPH doesn't have to wait for a law to come along to do the right thing.
@David: In Arthur Daley's parlance: "It's a nice little earner" for PPH.
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@David, the email options now let you turn off those annoying daily emails selling hourlies. Worked for me anyway and as far as I am concerned the issue has been fixed.
Also, I do not see that PPH should decide what jobs are morally acceptable. Yes, selling FB likes is spammy, but it is perfectly legal.
Even determining whether a job is is legal or not (unless it is obviously criminal) is difficult. I once turned down a web scraping job because I thought the client wanted to plagiarise the site he was scraping, but I later did some related work for him and found that he had a perfectly legitimate reason for scraping it (not sure about the legal position, but as long as he was not plagiarising I have no moral objection) .
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@Paul, I see no reason why PPH should enforce FB's policy - that is FB's problem. I would rather they spend the time and money improving customer service, removing illegal jobs etc.
@Deb, I can see how the economics of supertasker will work: most people will need work occasionally and most ly minor changes that take a few minutes - but they pay a monthly fee regardless. A few difficult jobs will trim the profits a bit but any obviously difficult jobs will be out of scope of the offering anyway. Not work I would want to do but I can see it could be profitable for some.
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@Paul, I see no reason why PPH should enforce FB's policy - that is FB's problem. I would rather they spend the time and money improving customer service, removing illegal jobs etc.
I wouldn't want to run a business where the service I offer causes harm that I can avoid. In this case I wouldn't want to be helping people mislead others and take money for facilitating the deception, whether it be FB likes or Amazon or other product reviews.
I don't need a law or special policy in place to know I should do the right thing even if others don't .
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Dear Michael
You wanted to know about spelling mistakes and so on in comms from PPH. I received this email today. I can see at least four things wrong with it. Can you?
(I don’t want to restrict this to Michael, though. It can be a collaborative thing. Anyone can join in!)
“Hey Moira K,
We think you are one of our top Sellers so we’d like to give you a boost. We've credited your account with an extra 45 free credits to send Proposals - how awesome is that? These credits won't rollover to the next month so take advantage of them now!
“Right now there are over 400 new Jobs being posted every day on PeoplePerHour and we don't want you to miss out on a single one. So what are you waiting for? You’re next Job is waiting for you. Don’t let it get away!”
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I recently received an invitation to do work for SuperTasker. I turned it down because I feel that PPH is competing with it's own customers.
The Project manager for SuperTasker felt this wasn't the case because all of the people being used for SuperTasker are drawn from PPH sellers. I don't agree.
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@David, yes, it may affect FB users - so it is still FB's problem not PPH's. The main reason FB care is that it cuts into their advertising revenue - and FB ads are also a way to artificially increase FB likes (if you advertise a page to enough people you will get lots of likes). In any case anyone who takes FB likes from strangers as a recommendation is being stupid.
Do you think FB deserves special treatment because they do not want to spend the money to enforce their rules (they could if they wanted to - except that it would be too expensive) or do you think that other websites should get the same? If the latter, that implies that for every job that involves another website in some way PPH need to check the web site rules (and relevant legislation in some cases) and decide whether the job follows the rules? How much would you be willing to see the fees go up by to cover the massive cost involved (and manually checking stuff is always expensive)?Even better is that fact that a lot of people selling FB likes have FB pages themselves - if I had half an hour to spare I could easily compile a list of a hundred or so FB pages selling FB likes. So you are saying that PPH should go further than FB themselves do to protect FB likes!
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Graeme, that all sounds a bit like not reporting burglars because the police should be finding them themselves.
It's super easy for PPH to do what is the right thing. It's not some abstract thing it's straightforward.
Fake FB and other likes are a form of fraud and PPH shouldn't be facilitating it.
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No its a bit as though you telling the police that someone had been burgled because they could not be bothered to do it themselves and then complaining that the police are not taking it seriously.
Furthermore it is the job of the police to protect the public from crime, it is not PPH's job to protect FB's business model or its more credulous (you really would have to be stupid to take the number of total likes as some sort of quality indicator) users.
What real harm to fake likes do to anyone (apart from the people who waste money on them, that is)? It makes information on Facebook inaccurate? Oh, dear, you mean I cannot believe everything I see on FB? I am shcoked!
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I'm really disappointed in your view of this Malcolm.
As far as I'm concerned, with the burglar analogy, PPH are supplying taxis to help burglars to go about their business.
You and I might be suspicious about FB and other likes, but I think the vast user population is quite naive in this respect. It's not about educating naive users is about having FB likes they can trust.
A FB like should be what it says it is and be genuine and as far as I'm concerned anything else is not acceptable, neither is companies helping people falsify FB likes (not just the people who actually do it, but the people - PPH - who actually who actually facilitate the abuse of the system by allowing these services to be advertised or fulfilled).
We'll agree to disagree.
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Seen as you've dragged me into this Paul, it sounds as though Greame doesn't give much of a toss about morals then.
No its a bit as though you telling the police that someone had been burgled because they could not be bothered to do it themselves and then complaining that the police are not taking it seriously.
I think I know what you mean by this, and if I am right, it doesn't make any sense at all. If someone can't be bothered to report a crime against themselves, then that's their problem.
FWIW Graeme, I think you may have used a very poor analogy.
Buying/Selling Facebook likes IS MORALLY WRONG, END OF. SIMPLES. It's an open and shut case.
I wish they'd make this d*mn box bigger !
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It is a pretty accurate analogy: FB cannot be bothered to do very much about this - let me repeat THEY DO NOTHING (OR LITTLE) ABOUT PEOPLE SELLING LIKES ON FB ITSELF.
In fact there is more: FB itself sells ads optimised for likes (i.e. they show them to people who click on anything) and let you set a budget per like. There are allegations they do worse: I will put the links in a separate comment as I have found comments with links get held for moderation.
That analogy only covers one of my points. Please see what I asked before.
No, it is NOT like false reviews because you are not making any statement other than that you clicked like. People like pages for lots of reasons - because they are a friend of the page "owner", because they saw an ad, because the page offers them an incentive (such as special offers on the FB page or for people who like the page), to make a political or social statement, because they are fooled by a deceptive viral message. A like is not a recommendation. You could even argue that selling likes levels the playing field between big companies that run ads for likes and small businesses
Also the question is not whether selling likes is moral or not, but whether it is something that PPH needs to address. I think PPH should only ban jobs that are illegal, do serious social harm (e.g. containing hate speech) , or would be damaging to the market as a whole.
The other question is if you think that FB like selling should be banned on PPH, do you also think that things like link selling should be banned as well? What about jobs that may or may not be moral on the facts in the job? What about jobs the morality of which reasonable people may disagree.
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The links referred to in my previous comment: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18819338 and http://www.searchenginejournal.com/facebook-ads-what-are-you-really-paying-for/46194/
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you are not making any statement other than that you clicked like.
This is incorrect. I am not saying "I clicked a button", I am saying "I like this" - which is patently untrue if the "like" is paid for.
A like is not a recommendation.
It is.
selling likes levels the playing field between big companies that run ads for likes and small businesses
Total nonsense.
the question is not whether selling likes is moral or not
Oh yes it is.
something that PPH needs to address
Depends if their moral compass exists or not. Some people don't seem to have one.
link selling should be banned as well?
There's a really good argument for that. It's not a moral issue at the same level as FB or other likes.
What about jobs that may or may not be moral on the facts in the job?
You can't ban liars. You can work to stop misleading ads and not penalise sellers who accept jobs only to find the job description is not a true reflection of the work.
What about jobs the morality of which reasonable people may disagree.
I am principally concerned by jobs that are part of a deception, illegality or causing harm. I'm not here to be a moral arbiter. The sales of FB or other likes is a deception.
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Leaving the moral and ethical issues out of it, because I don't believe PPH have any morals or ethics - quite simply, I think that reputable buyers and sellers who do have integrity will instinctively avoid sites whose main thrust seems to be grey/rubbish activities like selling facebook likes.
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@David,
"Why do FB pages value likes - because they attract more followers by giving an impression of confidence in the page contents."
"If the point of likes is to build trust, and the point of trust is to convince people to buy a product,"
Are misconceptions. The point of likes is to get exposure. The more people like something, the more will see it. I see where you and Paul are coming from, but I think you are wrong about why people buy likes and what difference they make.
@Paul, the Search Engine Journal article does indeed say that there is a "potential fraud", but that is possibly on the part of Facebook - the article is about Facebooks own like selling activities. Personally I think their theory #2 is the most likely explanation, but that still leaves FB on pretty morally dubious ground (even though they are not generating the "fake" likes, they are still profiting from them).
Also, I do not see how you can say that there is a moral difference between buying links in order to get more exposure via search engines and buying likes in order to get more exposure in Facebook. In fact given that the selling of links deliberately fakes a quality signal I would argue that it is worse.
"I'm not here to be a moral arbiter."
No, but you are asking PPH to act as moral arbiters.
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Re job 662536, I guess/hope that the bids he has got are offering to find 100 photos for couples - I doubt he really needs to commission a 100 original photos exclusively for his site. If he is not fussy it should be be possible to assemble 100 free to use photos that would suffice (although finding a 100 of them is still going to take long enough that $30 is going to be very low pay). Then again (I am not familiar with the law on this, least of all on the US) he will not get model releases properly documented with that, will he?
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