Freelancer.com has ruined my life

2. my freelancer experience dates back to the days of getafreelancer and I have way more reviews that the reviewer, so I think I can comment with my take on freelancer.

3. I have never had a issue with freelancer in regards to payment, either as a freelancer or as job poster. This is the one and only thing that they do well.(That said everything else is pretty poor)

4. I've had a couple of disputes there, mainly due to the ignorance of job poster on how payment is finally made, and this has always been settled in my favor.

Enough of the nice stuff.

Freelancer is a subscription site disguised as a job portal. IMO they don't give a shit about either the freelancers or the project owners, all they want to do is collect the subscriptions, which I think is not a bad business model. They have to go through the motions of giving a damn, but everything besides collection and disbursement is done on a shoestring and it shows.

Freelancer is the anti-pattern of how to do things online. They have earned a place as one of the classic a case studies on how not to do things on the web.

Their web site sucks in just about every respect, speed, not so much. Test environment = live site. so when they roll out changes, guess how that goes. Might have changed recently, I hope so, after all they have this wonderful pool of resources to draw on.

Their search engine is precious, search on "automate", fine, now search on "automated", and now on "automatic", and so on...

I estimate that less than 10% of job postings actually end up as actual projects. Now and then I tinker with the idea of monitoring their projects and collecting actual statistics, but then I realize that I have better things to do.

Job bids - fields are limited in to 200 character length, and then they have the cheek to send you an email saying basically, "hey, your bid sucks, you need to fix it"

You have no way to vet either bidders or job posters, used to be possible, but they took that feature away.

I'm receiving fake job offers which look like deliberate traps for ignorant subscribers. Can't prove that, but all the accounts are a day or so old for stupid amounts $10, or so. If you're desperate for any lead and click on Accept, hey look, Freelancer just deducted their $5 commission. This has been going on for a couple of months now.

I can go on, but that's enough. The fact is that the site is up and running and generating income. There must be thousands of subscribers hoping to find a career via the platform and freelancer is milking them.

TL/DR - Stay away, the site can be useful, but probably not for you unless you are v careful.

The problem, as always in this kind of situation, is how unequally the benefits are distributed.

If the investor pays 4-5 times (and that's a low end) less for something, while the worker gets 10% more compared to doing the same locally then it's unfair, even if both sides "benefit".

It's also natural for investors to seek the lowest prices they can get. That's why there are laws like minimum wage and other protections of the workers. The globalization is not just a way of getting things for cheap, it also a workaround for laws which prohibit investors from paying too little.

It's unfair, in my opinion, even if the worker does benefit. It gets much worse when the workers don't benefit at all. For example, in EU, we currently have a heated debate about delegated workers - people employed in one country and working (and living) in another. Companies do this to dodge the laws - minimum wage, social benefits, and so on - of their own country, while the workers suffer the higher costs of living in the richer country. It also makes the richer country native workers screwed. It's probably going to become illegal in the next couple of years.

People working remotely are in a different situation, in that they indeed live in a cheaper place. They still get paid much less than the minimum wage of the richer country where the investor comes from, which I think is also unfair. Also, the "cheaper place" is often not really - the prices in these countries are getting ever closer to the richer countries, while the wages lag behind the prices significantly.

In other words, there should be - and is, in many places - a limit on how badly workers can be exploited. The globalization is a loophole which circumvents these laws. I hope it will get closed in the future.

EDIT: note that it's definitely not the only way globalization affects people and many effects of globalization are positive. Just not this one, in my opinion.

I hire people on upwork. My favorite person charges $40 an hour. His work is great and gets repeat business from me many times a year.

I'm not sure what you're referring to as a scam. These places are free markets and free markets have fees.