Show HN: I made a crowdsourced hourly rate dataset for freelancers/contractors | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made a crowdsourced hourly rate dataset for freelancers/contractors

contractrates.fyi

34 pointsushercakes26 comments

I won’t sign up without having first a look at what I’m getting out of it. I can’t even see the current rates. Is this just a lame trick to get emails?

I promise you that it’s not. Maybe I’ll rethink this somehow, I just am trying to protect against bot traffic. Tying activity to a specific user makes it easy to ban access is all.

You might benefit from a (small) shift in mindset: what's bad about "bot traffic"[1] and if it is bad, is it bad enough to justify sacrificing user experience? People can get caught up in protecting against something hypothetical at the expense of something real. Especially early on in the life of a website/app/service, every interaction is very valuable and you want to make it as easy as possible to maximise the value you can get from the interaction. You can even go as far as to trade off your time for ease of use, e.g: remove any barrier to submitting a rate, but manually review new rates yourself before publishing. The likelihood and cost of someone submitting a bunch of bad rates is probably less than the cost of losing a contribution from someone who cannot be bothered to create yet another account.

[1] I'd go as far as to say I don't think "bots" are a thing worth worrying about at all early on because "bots" are a reaction to an opportunity to extract value from a service. For example, if a million people use your website, then spammers have an incentive... if nobody uses your website (or very few people) then there's no incentive. Spam is a problem you can deal with in future, if it ever happens, it's not something to worry about today, as long as you design your system such that if spam does happen, it's a headache for you, not users (i.e: a moderation queue). If you make the user experience bad to prevent hypothetical spam, well, the bots have ruined your website without even knowing it exists!

Isn’t captcha the usual default for that goal? At least for the read-access.

For write-access, some kind of identifier is sensible.

Also the View Rates pages fucks up the back button — that’s not very considerate of you

Good point. Planning to add captcha then.

Fixed the back button, I think. Sorry all - one man show here, really not trying to be malicious and iterating as fast as I can!

If I decided to scrape your data, spoofing email addresses would be near the bottom of my concerns.

I'll save you all the bother of signing up. The dataset is currently 45 rows. Not worth looking at yet.

Consider yourself heard, I removed the need to sign up

Please, if you are able, contribute and share your rate data! It won’t work unless people are transparent.

Still need to sign up.

I also just checked, still need to sign up

Im really sorry. Somebody kept posting expletives to the table so I had to force email verification as a way to protect against it. I’m thinking on alternatives to stop that kind of behavior but for now, I need to keep sign ups on

Unfortunately, there is a lot of abuse happening, one person in particular keeps adding data with N expletives. I’ve temporary blocked writes and I need to re enable forced sign in, I’m sorry all

Nice way to collect email addresses.

It is completely just a way to protect from bot traffic. I don’t think we even send a validation email. If you want, you can type in a dummy address, no worries

Please don’t abuse the back button.

This.

What do you mean by this? I don’t want to abuse the back button

It’s a cool idea man, stick at it. None of the complaints in this thread bear on the data product itself - just the UX. You’re by yourself, you’re clearly doing the best you can with what you’ve currently got. Bravo.

To the person trolling me adding profane data: I feel we have a weird relationship and you have actually been pretty helpful.

Thank you for your strange ways of bolstering my security.

Looks like you can't see the sheet without logging in?

Norwegian prices, no sign in required: http://konsulentpriser.no/

404: https://www.contractrates.fyi/freelancejobs

You might want to change your default favicon and add the possibility of filtering data based on country, YOE, Skills ecc

thank you, will do

Your email sign up form doesn’t work on Safari on iOS 15.6.1

looks like a good answer to the freelance side of levels.fyi. Good job OP, sorry for all the negativity in this thread.

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