Your issue may not be freelance talent quality, but the quality of the gigs and their offerers. When I first joined, I studied every LocalSolo offer forward to me, responded to many in personalized fashion, and invited further contact for a no-obligation discussion, as they say. For the past few months, though, I haven’t even bothered to open the LocalSolo emails. What happened in the interim? The would-be clients happened. They are asking for high volumes of professional work on impossible deadlines, or offering what pencil out to below-minimum-wage rates, and sometimes both. They clearly don’t study or respond to my outreach efforts; I would wager that many remain unread to this day. You have to realize the potential for vendor abuse that comes with this facility and many like it. Often, I believe, the gig is not real, just theoretical; or the gig has been promised to someone’s niece in-house and we’re just going through the pro forma motions here, or the person initiating the offer is deeply inexperienced and semi-professional and has no idea you can’t edit an 80,0oo word book for $200, or the offer-poster is literally playing / recreating / fishing — just to see what happens. If you can find a way to filter out the dilettantes on both sides of an offer, make participation worth everyone’s while, uplevel the expectations all around, and make LocalSolo a premium facility, I’m in. But right now, I’m picking up contract work that pays appropriately elsewhere.