Freelance Writers: Here Is Why You Suck
and why I hope ChatGPT takes over.
Recently I hired 5 different writers for a simple task, and they all failed epically!
This is going to be short but it’s not going to be sweet.
The venting will be the only sweet thing here.
I used to run this crypto-related blog on the side and I did most of the writing for it. Whenever I came into some money from ad revenue, some kind of sale, or freelance writing work, I usually put it straight back into the project.
When I say that I put it straight back in, I usually paid writers to help me out with more content, paid for someone to do some coding work, or I extended some kind of subscription service like Grammarly or one of the many SEO software services that I used.
I had come into some money and did the thing.
As usual, I looked around on Reddit, went to Fiverr, used a service called Narrato, and even went to social media for help.
Normally I didn’t like to use the same writing services on repeat because good writers are like deep-water fish, they migrate and move around all of the time.
For this one particular project that I had planned out, I needed a bunch of articles written.
I hired 5 different writers in total. Reason being, is I was also looking for a more long-term writer and I knew that I had to filter out the bad ones.
These folks had nothing in common except that they wrote articles and would hang about the freelancer sites looking for their next gig. I say this because I know what people will say once I explain who these people were.
That's racist, sexist, blah blah blah.
Totaling 4 different nations, different age groups, native and non-native English speakers, men and women! To be clear wokies!
The one thing they did have in common?
They all f*cking sucked big time!
One man from India was not even given the chance to start because his messages to me were unintelligible, I assume his initial message was some rinse-and-repeat spam magic he does to get jobs.
Another wanted to negotiate for 300 dollars more than what we had already agreed on, he was swiftly told to f*ck off!
A woman (allegedly) from Africa got the job.
She was amazing.
A great communicator, she had a resume I could look at, understood the brief, understood SEO, and had some experience writing about crypto. To cap off, she was able to start there and then.
She delivered the work, I read it and something did not seem right. My gut feeling was that this was not her work. I decided to run the text through a plagiarism tool and found 47% of the documents to have been ripped off from other websites!
F*cking b*tch!
The fourth was the cheapest, filled with grammatical errors, and spelling mistakes. It read like my mechanic's tax invoice (yes the below is real):
“ole change, tyres x 4 roatate, sparks updgrade, thanx for biznes cya nxt time m8”.
The fifth was the worst of all.
A modern-day Internet con-man.
But also because this guy doesn’t f*cking listen!
Even good con men have other flaws.
I told him 5, 6, 7, 8, I don’t how many times I repeated to him the keyword goes here, make this bold, these titles are H2, not H3.
I even highlighted it in yellow and made it bold in really big text for him to see what I wanted him to see.
I asked him, do you understand?, ‘yes’ he said, I offered him help, do you need any?, ‘nope I got this boss’, he’d submit it all, I’d take a look, see all the SAME mistakes all over again, ask him to check it over and see if he was sure it was ready, basically prompting him to fix his sh*t, ‘yep’ he’d continue.
I’d send it back politely because that’s just the kinda guy I am, gritting my teeth as I smashed my keyboard and explained to this pea-brained moron that he had, once again, repeated the exact-same-mistakes he had made the previous half dozen times and that it was beginning to become frustrating hearing him say that he understands and that ‘its all good this time boss’ when in fact he appeared to have no f*cking clue what he is doing!
This one particular moron even decided to offer to give me a free article because he knew he’d managed to royally piss me off (this part ties into a discovery I made later on in our short-lived relationship).
Answer me this genius, why the f*ck would I want to give myself more work and more headaches? You’re not doing me any favors by giving me your free-of-charge polished turd of an article. Moron.
I literally typed that out and was about to sever the relationship but I chickened out.
This last guy, we’ll call him Bill, wasn’t just the worst because he pissed me off the most and for the longest amount of time…
It was because he was cunning too.
Bill was a sneaky little bastard.
He hit all the right spots until he didn't.
Kind of like a Thai massage that you get but then they get to a spot where it just f*cking hurts like hell and they keep grinding their elbows in and you hope they will get back to being nice and good but they don't and then it's over and you’re not sure if you should be paying them or vice versa.
I could write a book about Bill!
None of his articles were even remotely similar, meaning that one would be legitimately amazing, and the next would be shockingly bad.
I honestly wondered if he was bipolar or something at one point in time.
I once asked Billy boy to write about a specific cryptocurrency, these things have ticker symbols for the crypto-uninitiated, you know like how Amazon is AMZN and Apple is APL, same thing with crypto, I asked him to write the article about Monero. The ticker symbol is XMR, really easy stuff right?
Wrong!
Bill wrote the entire article using the wrong ticker symbol XRM, instead of XMR, when I pointed it out to him he just apologized and went about his day. No offer to fix it or anything!
This went on and on, I’d scold him about something, the next article would be BRILLIANT, then he’d go back to providing sh*t quality work, in fact, the word quality should not be anywhere near this guy's name. It was anti-quality!
Eventually, through chatting with Bill which became a bit of a daily routine, I found out he wasn’t who he said he was.
Surprise surprise!
Bill had originally told me he was British, then he told me he was from Norway, but lived in England, then he said he actually lived in Norway, and in the end when I saw a picture of him on a website he submitted work too, he didn’t look English or Norwegian, but of course, he had a good reason for it all.
The last straw was when I asked Bill to write me an article about Terra Luna Classic ($LUNC), he wrote the entire thing about the other original Terra Luna, the one that crashed, and used the ticker symbol for it, instead of $LUNC he used $LUNA (now LUNA2.0).
Like are you f*cking just stupid or lazy or some combination of both?!
By this stage, I know what you are thinking. I am the idiot.
Why didn’t I j just fire him?
Firstly, in the beginning, he was OK, he charged reasonable prices, he did pretty good work, and he built a rapport with me. This is typical scammer behavior.
It's like fishing, you chum the water, some fish come into feed, they slurp up the chum, and then BAM!
Also, I did a deal with Bill that saved me money and gave him more work to do, instead of single articles I would do multiples of 3, 5, or 10. I got a discount and he got busy. So I could not renege on the deal otherwise I’d lose money…which is what eventually happened anyway.
When you work with someone, chatting away, you get to know them, you talk and in a weird kind of way, I felt sorry for him, it was nothing I even think he sought to do. He was too stupid. It wasn’t like he was exclaiming ‘poor me!’, it was just I could see he was smart to a point and had some skills but then his writing would get lazy, sloppy and he’d put his scam artist hat on when called out and calm me down.
Well here is what I found out about Billy boy.
Bill ran a scam where he would charge a premium to write so-called high-end well-researched crypto articles and he had the history and connections to prove it.
He would approach you, show you his work, name his price, and the client (me in this case) would go look at said work on these top-notch, well-known, and popular crypto-related sites and publications and so you’d think to yourself that you had just discovered a really good deal.
Bill would charge $100 for something that a guy writing for the same publications and news sites would charge $500 or more for!
So what he does is that he charges what appears to be a really good price, too good, then he goes and hires the same kinds of dumbasses I spoke about earlier, he tidies their work up and submits it, like a kind of article writing arbitrage.
How do I know this?
He admitted it to me without knowing he was doing so!
Like I said earlier, Bill was part brilliant, part dumbass!
I won’t go into the details but he essentially revealed that he had a team of writers accessible to him through a third party that owed him favors (this last part was probably BS) and that he could get hundreds of articles written for free because it was something he had paid for in the past and something-something, I stopped listening at this point, because he was doing what he always did and began diverging into lies.
The point was that he admitted he had a team of paid idiot writers he used…!
Let me repeat, as I said, Bill was “writing” for many top crypto journals, publications, and news sites, and had been doing it for years, unbelievable!
What do OpenAI and ChatGPT have anything to do with this?
If it ain't obvious. The web is littered with scam artists like Bill.
Go post a request on any gig or tasker-type site asking for someone to write a 500-word article on your choice of topic and watch the spam come in.
In the past, I have had as many as 30, 40, and 50+ message requests in under a few minutes when posting these types of tasks.
These people don’t even read the brief, and I suspect they have teams or bots that do these proposals and submissions to get a foot in the door.
Therefore, I welcome our AI overlords!
I can’t wait for the many services like OpenAI with its ChatGPT and all of these AI super bots to kill these scammer's jobs because they don’t deserve it.
Honestly.
They lie, cheat, and steal.
Why should they get paid, and why should we have to read their nonsensical garbage?!
But who is reading this stuff if it's that bad?
One reason is that many of these so-called writers also publish or work for publishers of niche sites.
A niche site is a type of website that focuses on very narrow subjects and topics, for example, Honda Generator Repairs.
What they will do is design the entire site or blog around this topic and they will fill it with hundreds of articles answering questions that people punch into Google.
Continuing with the example of Honda Generator Repairs, an owner of a Honda generator may type in ‘how to stop surging in a honda generator?’.
Through lots of on-page and off-page SEO and many articles on the topics the site will begin to rank and then the poor reader might read some stuff that makes sense to Google, but not to the human with a real-world problem that needs fixing.
I have stumbled across many of these sites before, and the one thing that they always have in common is that they are littered with ads!
And of course, in my crypto experience, these writers get paid by publications and news websites to write about all manner of specialist topics that they are supposed to be experts in but 9/10 they have no clue!
When you think of a news website, you probably are thinking of something like The New York Times with its hundred of writers, journalists, editors, proofreaders, researchers, and assistants. But most news websites that get ranked in Google are usually small teams and these folks just churn out stories with little to no time spent on confirming the accuracy or even readability of the work!
This is how these freelance scammers operate, they churn through massive numbers of articles and clients and just hope that no one notices. Often no one does!
But what about the good writers?
If what I hope happens and AI writers take over, won’t it ruin people's livelihoods?
Nah. I don’t think so. Well not really anyway.
Sure this will affect the scammers, spammers, and conmen like Bill. But for your everyday blogger or online writer I don’t think that this will affect them negatively.
Good writers and artists will forever be needed in the same way that we prefer to pay for live music made by humans using guitars over electronically created doof-doof, even though there is also a market for that.
When you read a blog, you read about the person behind the blog too. Like in this case, you are reading about my experiences. An AI doesn’t have that, although, it can of course just make it up after scanning my stories and online profiles. But then, when it does inevitably make these things up, after it builds my online profile and puts my work into it’s database, it too will essentially be lying, unless there is an admission of sorts and if there is an admission why would anyone read it outside of short-lived entertainment?
This is not going to change anytime soon, to the point where the next generation is going to want to read about the life of X17GHTRS. It just won't. Maybe as a novelty. Maybe.
What I hope and think will happen is that the online writing space will be cleansed.
Scammers and shitty writers will opt to either give up, pay for and start using these kinds of services themselves which will only make their writing better anyway and the good writers will just continue doing what they have always done. Creating high-quality content.
It's a win/win.
I’ll also make a quick prediction; I think that as hardware robots and digital AI technology do make it unnecessary for us to pay a human when we can pay a bot a fraction of what the human charges, I think that humans will either come together to form artisan type services and in parts of the world some of this stuff will be made mandatory.
Meaning that in the same way that we stamp “MADE IN USA” or “HAND MADE” on products, we will start to add stamps like “MADE BY A HUMAN” or “THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN BY JOHN, A HUMAN”.
No part of this article was generated by AI.
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