Over the past decade whether it’s in web design, freelance graphic design, or any version that is slowly being taken advantage of by large corporate entities seeking to take advantage of individual artists.

Originally these companies were created to attempt to help graphic designers such as Freelancer, Upwork formerly Odesk, and Fiverr just to name a few.

These companies over the years promised a Rosy picture for graphic designers to earn money for themselves and be independent and earn money for themselves instead of being in the outside world where there are lots of scams and con artists which are rampant.

Over time these companies started creating a system that was originally used for the good of the artist and began taking advantage of freelancers.

These companies use many tactics, mainly of which using a simple star system and trying to isolate the artist and contain them within their isolated ecosystem. With artists and designers and programmers locked into these ecosystems, it is extremely difficult to move out of them. Most of the time when designers and programmers enter these types of programs they are required to not try moving any of the clients or getting information to move outside the platform if they do they will get their accounts locked or banned. sometimes when these accounts get locked band The artist or programmer ends up losing money and there’s no way to reverse what the site has done. 

These sites also do things like supposedly doing background checks and trying to filter out scams and spam. But truthfully these scams are extremely difficult to detect and they’re very hard to remove. Every day there are countless amounts of scammers getting into these ecosystems and trying to hire designers and trying to take advantage of them. These ecosystems just let them through because they’re interested in profit.

With the designers and programmers being locked into these ecosystems there would be very little way of removing themselves from it and taking a while to clients with them. It leaves artists and programmers very vulnerable and having constant anxiety of worrying about their accounts being locked because of a disgruntled person.

Another thing: any messages that the artists or designers send back and forth between them and the clients are constantly being monitored by artificial intelligence also so it’s not just people being monitored by other people; computers using artificial intelligence are watching tens of thousands of workers and designers all the time with no notice. Artificial Intelligence is also given the ability to block people’s accounts.

People who use these types of platforms are also taken advantage of because they end up bidding on the projects they want to do. And each one of these projects can sometimes be 8 coins or 16 coins and these numbers are determined by the pro project and they’re using them as a weight system so the more coins that people bid the higher up in the reply thread their proposal goes. These proposals do not guarantee the designer or programmer to get the job, it just means it is higher in the list. then after so many of these proposals have been sent out the only thing they can do is either wait for the number of coins to replenish or they would have to pee. and with these systems being some of these people’s only source of income they are constantly paying money to attempt to find jobs to make money so, in turn, these giant corporations are making even more money off the people that are trying to make money.

 What is even worse is that if someone does win a project the worker will end up paying 30% wherever they are earning up to $10,000 and that goes directly to the platform they are using. So none of the money that is in that 3% goes to them and between $5000- $10,000 is a lot for those projects many projects are only a couple of hundred dollar range. Doing this is constantly making a cycle which the workers are having cannot get out of and it resets every month. This example is mainly coming from Upwork some of the other platforms have different methods such as fiber which they say the minimum amount for the project is $5 but they take $2 out of every $5 project which leaves a person only with $3 which in return does not even equal minimum wage if they somehow magically can earn money from wherever they are trying to do. 

These giant platforms are not the only type, there are other types also which are called content mills. Content Mills are a different type of ecosystem we’re a person pays money for a contest usually of some sort and then a designer or web designer doesn’t apply for the contest instead they work for free and hope that the person who made the contest will pick their design. This type of method is filled with all sorts of pitfalls in auction resulting in the designer Never Ever Getting peed. while the companies are constantly saying this will improve their portfolio but in the long run, some designers can work hundreds of hours before next to no pay. 

There are numerous versions of these types of systems and for Simplicity, I can not go into great detail as there are simply too many of these content Mill type of platforms out there. But the fact is that they still also do the same type of thing that they’re luring people by locking them into an ecosystem and forcing them to work for free and hoping that they will win a contest. Another problem with this type of content Mill system is that it encourages designers to go cut through any other as well as a person who is doing the contest to encourage other users to steal work from each other.

Often these types of contact bills can ask for all sorts of things such as logos or artworks in Macon range between $205 per contest but since the person is practically working for free here competing against 40 or 50 other designers and they’re all uploading work at the same time it is extremely hard to compete in an environment like that and where art theft is very common it becomes a toxic ecosystem end usually the designer is the one who loses. 

How to fix a broken freelance system like this is to go back to its roots and try to decentralize the entire thing how it used to be before these platforms took over the entire planet. To do this would be an enormous task even I have no idea exactly how to do it. I think the first idea would be to free open source software similar or equivalent to the software that these platforms are using. and then distributed to end designers.

 Another idea is to have the filtering system out there to allow people to come in and look for designers and this system will help eliminate scams but allow designers to shuffle and move their data from one system to another without locking them into a system. Another thing that should be done I think to fix this type of problem is to allow designers to use the regular portfolio instead of forcing them to upload the artwork into the locked-in systems which are out there so it is separate from these massive corporations. What tends to happen is that the designers have the folio and the star systems in reviews on these networks and they’re unable to move them so if their account is locked or shut down all that background is removed and they have to start completely from scratch due to systems that are set up for each platform.

 I do not think there’s a simple solution or just one solution but a lot of it involves trying to make these systems more designer-friendly not making it strictly and solely for the person that’s putting money into it because at the end of the graphic designer or programmer is getting the short end of the stick and it’s not good for them because, in the end, they’re the ones that are making Curry and the content, not the people who are asking for the contents. 

By Rodney