I am a home owner so I approach this from a different perspective to sitters. I’m also in my 60’s so I’ve seen a lot of good and some bad in my life.
I’ve read this thread of 66 posts (so far) so the issue is important enough for a group of sitters who have experienced a bad home owner.
THS offers a service of connecting sitters to home owners and provides some safety features around that introduction. More safety features means a higher cost of membership.
While almost all of my sitters have been very responsible, I’ve had a few glitches along the way with some sitters due to one of my dogs escaping when they left the door open despite being warned about Pip’s Houdini skills. But I don’t blame THS for this, I hold the sitter responsible.
Ok, let’s not exaggerate. We’re not asking about replacing the review system with a new one. And either way, teams of 1 or 2 people routinely build entire startups in far less than 18 months. (I did that too, a few times even.)
Blinding reviews requires minimal code changes, and no changes to the data structure. The reviews are simply held in a queue (an addition to the data structure - practically one boolean column called published or such; no migration required), and published once both parties have left a review. This change could have been implemented in a week max, and would’ve solved 90% of the problems users have been complaining since April 2021. Basic Pareto principle.
The unfortunate truth is probably that,
the THS developer team is either extremely small and extremely swamped (with what, I don’t claim to know, maybe more technical debt than useful features or bug fixes), or just not that competent. I’ve reported so far a bunch of rookie mistakes like not accounting for time zones - unless you’re in the UK, the times in the Android app are wrong by your GMT offset. I’ve even provided one-line code fixes. Nothing was ever implemented. All but one of my posts were held by moderators and replied to privately with the generic “We’ve sent this to the tech team but can’t tell you when it will be implemented”.
or the PMs are completely oblivious to user requests, thought I’m inclined to believe that the mods here do proxy feedback
or the PMs’ priorities are completely out of touch with what users ask for on the forum. I’ve seen that with other apps, most notably Google Photos, and food tracking app Cronometer.
I believe a lot of the THS employees lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic and members not renewing. As you say, the moderators here (and experienced owner/sitter members) do a proxy job and do it very well too. Hopefully things will improve…