I've been using Lyft more and more lately. Drivers just seem.... better. And I don't mind tipping in the app.
If you pick me up promptly, follow your GPS, have a car that is functional, and either engage me in pleasant conversation or say nothing at all besides 'hello', I will give you five stars. Many drivers seem to act as if they are driving their friends around as opposed to driving their clients around.
That in itself is possibly a contributing problem. Incentives go all wonky when four-star ratings essentially don't exist. Five-star ratings should be reserved for exceptional service, and three-star ratings should be for average service, not "I'm unhappy with this but not enough that I won't feel bad giving a negative review, so I'll give it three stars." People don't know how to rate, and it makes all our rating systems much less accurate.
Personally I don't care if there is no incentive to go above and beyond the base level of service. All I want and expect is the base level of service. If you want to reward epic service, do so with off the books tipping.
This is the exact problem. A base level of service should be three stars, but people have been conditioned to read five stars as base level, and anything below as problematic. The whole point of a rating system is to get an idea of what to expect. When different people rate on different metrics, the data doesn't actually represent what you think it does (whichever metric you subscribe to).
The only reason anything less than five stars is interpreted weirdly is because people started rating weirdly and then start taking that into consideration when looking at the ratings, and it gets all confused. Many of these ratings systems clearly state what each rating level means, and people still don't rate by those criteria. People have been culturally indoctrinated to rate things incorrectly (that is, they specifically don't follow the instructions in lieu of following what has become the norm). This compresses one end of the spectrum which leads to loss of fidelity on that end. It's clearly worse than a system where people actually followed the criteria and we could actually identify a five star average as exceptional, a four star as good, and a three star as sufficient.
Then again, everyone wants that "I ordered 4.9 star out of 5 item on Amazon" reassurance...
When I go to a restaurant, pick up the order, I rate the restaurant either thumbs up (all went well) or thumbs down (something wrong, with option to choose what). They also rate me. I drop off, same thing happens. I rate them up or down, they do too.
Maybe they're just confused by everyone calling it "ride sharing."