Thanks for being on Moonlight! We have been working hard to increase the number of jobs. It's been about doubling month over month and has been our #1 focus. We are working on a lot of product and marketing initiatives focused on that.

It looks like you've submitted a few proposals - unfortunately, half of the jobs stopped before selecting a developer. If we had more posts on the site, getting declined would be more of a numbers game and less noticeable. Still, keep at it - looks like you have two open matches right now!

The good news is that, among people who get selected for jobs, they often get rehired again and again by the same client.

I'll give it a shot again in 6 months. I've since landed a contract (not related to the platform) but my gut is that my effort was not worth it. I got much better results from my own local networking at higher rates.

Clarification: 3 of the 7 projects you applied to were canceled without selecting a project - but this isn't a representative sample.

How have those projects been duds?

They either ask for a dev and then take it back (half of the time, according to Phil above), or my guess is they think I'm too expensive (and yet, I'm still priced less than the average that you see for a senior front-end/rails developer). The proposals I submit are highly targeted - what they need is exactly what I can provide. And yet only 1 proposal has lead to a statement of work, and they rejected it.

Whereas a serious amount of networking locally yielded me a 10% pay increase and a 6 month contract.

I think this is why you get all of this advice saying that these kinds of sites are a race to the bottom and not worth investing too much time into.