I fondly remember being on Rentacoder, later vWorker as a freelancer.

While it had the same issues regarding freelancer quality and price-wise being a race to the bottom, you could find some great clients when you ignored job postings containing the usual red flags.

Also, the site was ugly (and by ugly i mean mid-nineties ugly) but it was functional, their team was top-notch and never had any issues payment wise or other.

Of course everything went to sh*t when it was sold off to freelancer.com and that was the point i stopped being on sites like this.

Seems it was the right decision.