The Dark Side of Easy Cash: My QComment Review Experience

I stumbled upon a pretty easy way to make some extra cash by writing reviews. I thought it was kinda like a gig, but faster and shorter. Yeah, right. I looked into a few similar sites (I'll call them review farms), and I settled on QComment. I don't even remember how I chose it, but I do remember that the other platforms were even worse.

About the moral side of review farming. I've come across a phenomenon where people use your offer, but don't leave good reviews. Negative reviews come pouring in, but when everything's good, they just stay silent. From the outside, it looks like there are more negatives than positives, which affects potential customers. Sellers are forced to resort to review farming to balance things out or to attract customers in the first place. So, I don't see anything wrong with writing positive reviews for money.

Signing up is a breeze: we come up with a username, confirm our email. For the first little while, we're only given access to cheap tasks like liking something, watching a video, and other online activities. The actual comments and reviews become available only after we pass the 'exam'.

The exam is a test and a short essay of no more than 600 characters on a given topic. There were a few topics:

I chose the first one. I dug up some fancy words from the back of my mind, wrote the text, and then had to cut it down to size because of the 600-character limit. That 'essay' was reviewed for 6 days, and while I was waiting, I was only given access to tasks without writing comments.Sellers don't bother with clear task descriptions, decent instructions, or even proper headings. My favorite is 'dzhim'. I have no idea what it means, which website it's for, or what I'm supposed to do. It's a shame they don't make sellers take the exam.

You spend way too much time trying to figure out what the seller wants. You have to go into each task separately, read the poorly written instructions with typos, click on the link the seller left, and so on.

Once you figure out what you can do, you click 'start' and you're given up to 25 minutes. I usually finish in 5. The tasks I've done include typing a search query into Google, watching a video, liking something, or playing a game. The websites are all over the place: Yandex Maps, Dzenn, VK, 2GIS, Google Maps, YouTube. Telegram's the most common one. You need accounts for all of this. If you have them, great. If not, think twice about wasting your time on registration. Some sellers have conditions: your account needs to be N years old, you need 150 friends on VK, or you need a live Telegram profile with a photo, posts, and so on.

After completing the task, the client checks it (takes one day), and then rubles are credited to your account. Payment, as you see, is mostly in rubles, but sometimes in dollars. I didn't bother with these small tasks. I thought, okay, they'll approve my essay, and then I'll be making millions on comments. Just kidding. But I did hope that for text tasks, there would be more money. Yeah, right.

After six days, I got a message from support that the exam was accepted. I was excitedly rubbing my hands together, so I went to the 'Projects' page and...

And there was just one task with a comment, and it was paid in dollars. I have no idea how to exchange those for rubles. On other days, I was still able to complete a couple of tasks for comments. In both cases, the client provided the text, which was ungrammatical and lacked punctuation, like something written by a regular person. They paid 4 rubles per comment.

The interface on the site hasn't changed since the 2000s. It takes a long time to figure out where things are. Useful buttons are hidden behind tiny symbols, and you have to waste precious time to find what you need.

And the most important thing, which made me stop using this platform, was when I decided to check how to withdraw my money. And here's what I found:

The minimum withdrawal amount is 5000 rubles. How many times do you have to collect those five thousand rubles at 4 rubles per task? But even that didn't make me give up on the platform. The main problem is the lack of options for withdrawing money. There's a withdrawal option via Sberbank, but it's not available, and you can only use some Tether service. I googled it, and it's a cryptocurrency. I have no idea what that is, so I didn't even try to figure it out.

CONCLUSION

I'm not doubting that it's possible to earn those five thousand rubles on QComment. It'll take a lot of time (maybe two years), skills to navigate different sites, and well-established profiles, but it's possible. The only problem is, how do you withdraw your money? There are no options, and you can only use one service. Now I'm looking at irecommend with new eyes. It's all so modern, simple, and easy to use.