I took a break from selling on Upwork in 2017 until late 2019. So I've been back on the platform for under 6-months. In that time I've completed about 12 projects, and out of 9 reviews, 8 of them have been 5-star reviews. The one review that wasn't 5-star, was a 4.7-star highly satisfied client.
Now if we did the old simple calculation of averaging out all the ratings, I've lost only 0.30 rating points across 9 reviews, so that would be either 5.0 or in percentages, clearly 99.9%.
Yet, despite not having 1 single negative review, despite having done fairly sizeable jobs of at least several hundred dollars and several over 2K, my JSS has recently dropped first from 100% to 85% and then to 82%.
The more good feedback I get from happy clients the lower my JSS has gone. I recently received 2 new 5-star reviews on significant projects, and then in the latest update yet another drop in rating.
With coronavirus some clients I had open contracts with were either ill or their business was affected. I had one job awarded, and before it ever began the client said let's cancel it, because things we're difficult in Germany where they were located. On other jobs the contracts are completed, but clients seem less likely to leave reviews.
I don't know to what extent lack of feedback on some jobs, or a sudden open/close of a contract can have on the JSS of a freelancer. But if a freelancer whose statistical average rating is 99.9% can be listed as 82% without any unhappy clients, it's certaintly a misleading system. Imagine as a buyer if you are sometimes buying on the platform, would you ever look at a freelancer with a 95% and another at 85%, and think that in actual fact the freelancer with 85% may have more consistently good ratings? Would you bother to read the reviews to find out? If the JSS routinely deducts 10-15% because of client behavior that is beyond control of the freelancer, then the system isn't much different from a lottery. I actual read in the JSS guide to how the score is calculated, that the system automatically presumes that if a contract is opened and $0 is exchanged, that the client must be unhappy. Who designed such a foolish system? The client could be sick, or dead, or bankrupt. Or they may have changed their mind about the project. Whatever the reason, how do freelancers predict if a client might cancel a project that is never started, or that they may never leave any feedback regardless of the outcome? Why does Upwork measure our prediction skills instead of our freelance work skills?
Aside from the JSS algorythm itself, it is also notable that my JSS started to rapidly decline shortly after I strongly objected to Upwork automatically cancelling all of my bids after a technical issue left me locked out of my account. The Upwork tracker had a glitch in it's Google Sign-on integration, and the result was that my account ended up temporarily locked. It only took a few hours to regain access, but the cost to me as a freelancer was thousands of dollars in bids lost. Upwork for some reason, has a policy of automatically deleting all bids even if you're locked out only for 1-second. Of course Upwork compensated me for the situation by paying me $6 in connect refunds for in exchange for the thousands of dollars of time lost on bids and the $60 worth of bid connects that the system took.
After raising this issue on Twitter and calling Upwork out for this policy, in subsequent updates my JSS has declined from 100% to 85% despite receiving only 5-star reviews in that period of time, combined with only 5-star reviews in the previous 6-months overall with the exception of a 4.7 star review. It's hard not to think that somebody has in some form flagged the account or made a manual edit to the JSS score.
