Ciao - it's OUR fault -- what's your opinion?

Tweet

Hi all! I've been traveling for 3 weeks now (very dizzy!!) and I just logged on to mylot and ciao and discovered that the recently lowered incentive rate of .25 cents has been removed. I was quite surprised and disappointed - Ciao was great little stream of income and for some time, I did many reviews, just for the cash incentive. I'd like to start an open, honest and adult (meaning, let's all be mature here!) discussion about this, so we can all learn from this experience. I bet a lot of mylotters were ciao members as well and this has greatly affected many of us. Ciao perhaps had many reasons for removing the incentive system - first of all, they did say it was only a temporary thing. It's not a sustainable system. Also, they were bought out by Microsoft (?) a few months back. Plus, the US economy, of course, a big factor. In my opinion however, I think the biggest contributor to Ciao sudden;y tightening their purse strings is US - the members. In my mind, the people running Ciao probably got wise to the members who use it for making money (remember, that's not what it was created for) and just said "We're not taking this anymore!!" I understand that money is still money - there's nothing bad about it, wanting it, earning it or using it. I too, am guilty of using Ciao to make money; I did make quite a bit in my first month, especially since my regular writing gigs were few and far between at the time. I also understand that for many of us here, $5 a day could mean a lot or could even be a regular income for many. Like myself, perhaps a lot of us just wrote the bare minimum - 120 words and you get a buck! I'm confessing this because I felt users like myself were not helping the site, rather, we were feeding off of it. I feel particularly guilty because as a writer, I SHOULD be able to write better and longer reviews, rather than just make the minimum effort. The only thing I could not condone was plagiarism, which I saw a lot of in Ciao. I even posted one time here on MyLot that a friend of mine, who worked for a legitimate magazine, was a victim. A lot of people here on mylot said to "leave it alone". I can't help but wonder, that if I had been more vigilant in reporting these cheaters, less people would have cheated and Ciao management wouldn't have felt like they were being cheated and kept on being generous. BTW, I eventually DID report this guy and unfortunately, he's still up there. I wrote to Ciao and their response was that they were dealing with a lot of these cheaters. Another issue that has bothered me is something I've kept to myself, but I've been dying to discuss. I read on someone's review (on Ciao), that Ciao is not a place "learn english". While a majority of the users can write and speak english, there are many people who can't write in english and their reviews are pure gibberish. One part of me agrees with whoever posted this - First and foremost, Ciao is an english-language website. It's so obvious that these people who write gibberish are just in it for the money. Reviews are another thing that irks me - but then I used to be guilty of giving only good to excellent reviews. However, I started noticing that people were giving good reviews and comments to gibberish reviews! Since then I started giving not so good reviews either. So that's my 2 cents (or 2 dollars, since I've written so much). I've made these observations since I started Ciao and I've kept them to myself because I thought this would make a lot of people angry. And now it probably will make some of you irritated, but I'm just really curious if people had the same thoughts as I did. I look forward to hearing from all of you!