Paid connections on UpWork - is it good or bad?

Question

Upwork

Since May, upwork has been gradually rolling out the paid connections system. The transitional period will be until the end of June, after which all connections will be paid.
See here for details .
Possible reasons why upwork took this step.

1. The service is financially bent and trying to squeeze out more money
   
2. Due to automatic bidding, the quality of responses decreases and, as a result, upwork is less and less considered as a platform for finding adequate performers. As a result, upwork's revenues are falling.
   

What is your opinion gentlemen?

Answer 1

80% of their checkout is the top 20% of orders by price. And their expenses are linear, refusing conditionally 80% of the homeless, they will reduce their expenses by 5 times, thereby increasing profits.

Answer 2

Possible reasons why upwork took this step.

And it seems to me that after the introduction of a 20% commission, this step is very logical - they continue to weed out penny orders smoothly (when I just started I was very surprised by the amount of the same slag for which everyone does not like Russian freelancing, only there it is also several times more) and working for food (when 100,500 responses to an order are bad for everyone), which, in addition to dumping (which is also bad for everyone), create a negative attitude among customers and, as a result, greatly reduce the reputation of the exchange and the number of normal orders, which in turn leads to a decrease the number of professionals and even more / faster turns the exchange into the bottom.
So in general, this is rather positive news.

Answer 3

well, this is a road to nowhere, instead of developing recommendation systems, advanced filters, etc., they start pumping out money, explaining service problems that cannot be solved through paid connections.
Usually, either connections are paid, or commission for payments, but not all together. . .

Answer 4

Lol, is this Upwork bending over? A world resource of workers for food?
Not that expected, but quite understandable decision - Upwork decided to cut down more money without any ulterior motives.
Nothing personal just business.

Answer 5

I am for paid connections. I see only positives. Less spam and flooding, more relevant offers for the customer, now 100 Indians will not fly into the application, but only 50, although they do not interfere in my segment.

Answer 6

We don't have the data to make any meaningful
guesses

Answer 7

I have a Plus plan, so I’m purple) In addition, I haven’t spent connections for a long time, while there are enough orders from regular customers + invites

Answer 8

Yes, everything has been smoothly moving towards this for a long time.
Look at the same fl with its unlimited