ty a.

It is designed to keep you just interested, but not to find you a relationship. I guess if it did, they will lose business. In terms of this, this site (as well as most dating sites) is a scam.
1. Your message is not directly delivered. Your message is only visible to the receiver if they "like" you. I do not understand why any person would write a proper introduction to someone or more than a few words because the chances of your message being read is nearly non-existent.
2. The matching process is superficial. You're basically matched by the pictures and a small introduction, assuming there's mutual "liking" of these two criteria. As mentioned above (no. 1), there's no mutual selection happening based on a conversation. Looks do matter, but when there's profile after profile to choose from, the selection process becomes too superficial.
3. They do not show all available profiles in your area, so good luck if you live in a small town. Every time I refresh the browsing page, the same few people shows up. As I've found out, you must "pass / unlike" them in order to have a new person shown to you. Algorithms are against users in this case.
4. Difficult to find people based on interests because they only allow their own keywords under the search options.

Overall, I found Okcupid to be a huge waste of time, a platform designed to defeat the purpose it's meant to do from a customers' point of view.

The platform is a waste of time for the majority of people who expect genuine connections. Here's why.

Ladies get over a 1000 messages upon a few weeks of creating their profile, especially if they are attractive. I was told of this fact a few times and I have reason to believe it is true. This gets the majority of the messages unanswered whether its coming from a guy or a girl. So, if youre a narcissist, this is your place to be to feel superior. From the guys perspective, it would be very discouraging to write any meaningful message since you almost always never get a response- however, at the same time, the few responses you may receive might create a craving for a dopamine surge and reason to continue the cycle.

It is extremely rare that you get a response or a first message if youre from a non western country or from a selected few eastern asian countries (Korea and Japan in particular). Your profile may get looked once or twice a month, and even most of the people who would bother to respond to you will not look at your profile (a sign of not interested). It is not for the rest of the world.

You almost always see in profile descriptions that they request you write in a certain fashion asking not to start conversation with hi or how are you? And other trite demands when contacting themanother narcissistic example.

Overall, this is like a dating site. The best proof is to browse through profiles and see who appears in their friends list. 99% of the time, it is people from the opposite sex. If youre a guy, this makes it awkward to write to another guy (who has all lady friends). This platform is designed like any other social media platform based on dopamine-driven feedback loops. It is designed to keep users stick to the loops without giving exactly what they are looking for- meaningful relationships - once formed which would make users not continue to use the site.

If youre genuinely interested in finding pen-pals, I suggest using sites which do not operate like social media sites with elaborated profiles with pictures and links. Chat sites specifically designed for language exchange are also very good for this, which would actually make users interact and form relationships.

I've used all the major freelancing platforms out there and PPH is my favorite along with Fiverr. It has currently the lowest commission rate (15%) compared to Fiverr's and Upwork's 20%, so more value for both buyers and sellers. Unlike other services, it doesn't hold your earnings for too long and often the earned amount is available for withdrawal on the same day as completed. The platform functions well if you're a freelancer. The only issue I experienced is that sometimes message notifications are extremely late when it gets to your personal email, so you have to be on the lookout for messages. PPH seems to be relatively new with a developing client base, so rarely does a job get posted in my field. However, I get contacted from time to time by genuine clients.

If you use a credit card here, they take something like a dollar without your consent, stating that it is to verify whether the credit card belongs to you. You're supposed to wait a month or how long it takes you to see this secret amount they've taken registered in your statement and report that to them in order to have that deposited back to you. That's a cheap scam because most people wouldn't bother. But, how much are they earning by doing this? Further, if you earned some amount here and get awarded another project, they take the project fee of the new order from your existing balance. Good luck decoding the transactions pageIve only done two jobs + another job offered here and its already a mess with 13 entries. Id be out as soon as I get my money out.

Some months ago, they came out with a rates plan that matches the highest in the market (a 20% commission, as I remember, for $1000 or less contracts/jobs). They are now permanently suspending freelancer accounts stating that the freelancer has sent a "high number of proposals for jobs on our site without many contracts or earnings". I am not sure whether this is a good tactic in the long run because they're closing the door for many qualified and genuine freelancers who can offer much variety to the services requested and offered. Instead, they should improve their algorithms for matching freelancers to work or by improving their archaic platform for better searching of services on offer and requested. I've been successful in other popular freelance sites, but here (earned just over a couple of hundred dollars in one year, while most of my earnings came from other sites)--and, it is not a good sign to see fellow freelancers been suspended for what an Upwork employee posted in a discussion board as "removing non-selling items from the shelf".