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Comment by zakk | Hacker News Reader

The solution is simple: ratings are inflated since they are an endless resource. Let’s make them a scarse resource.

It’s what works in the academia, where anyone can get aribitrarily close to a 4.0/4.0 GPA, if the grades are inflated enough, but clearly only 10% of students can fit in the top 10% of the class, making this latter rating much more significant.

Simple example (I am sure there are better ways of doing so) after ten Uber rides you are given five stars, and you can distribute that to the drivers you liked the most.

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Or weight the 'value' of your stars by how many stars you normally give, so a 5-star review from someone who normally gives 3.5-star reviews is worth more than a 5-star review from someone who always give 5-star reviews

There must be a better way because lord knows I don't even remember the experience of my last uber ride, let alone my last 10 :P

The problem with ratio ratings like you propose is that there is no end.

You have to anchor the ratings or they have no grounding in reality. (Produce a few models of bad service and drivers and excellent service and drivers.)

That is, unless you really want to chase some sort of unattainable perfection.

Except it doesn't work in academia, because it's the same system that's commonly present in corporate-land, and in practice it's horrible and has multiple flaws.

It’s not perfect, but it’s much more meaningful than GPA.

Is it? Understand I am in no way defending GPA, but I don't think it can be taken as given that one works better than the other without some evidence.

GPA in practice has numerous problems on which I could write a whole other book, but where it fails it is often for social reasons which would equally apply to and be gamed by people under the "limited resource/grade to the curve" model.

You will see people start to game away and politicise how the "stars" are awarded and distributed in both. In the later specifically, you run the real risk of having to start to fail genuinely good people and pass genuinely bad people. And there is no universal algorithm used by people in their subjective distribution of stars that allows one to compare or interpret the distribution of stars after the fact or between different "ecosystems".

Honestly the only thing that gets me rating at all is that the app asks a short time after the trip. I imagine this method would just mean less ratings

Now you have to decide does no rating mean good (nothing to complain about) or bad ("No comment.")

The GPA is a ranking system. Here we are talking about measuring a quantity (the quality of service).

With sufficient training and effort 100% should be meeting or exceeding the minimum quality standard. It should not be forced into a normal distribution.

The simplest solution though is to replace the arbitrary and meaningless 5-start system with a simpler two choice system: "Did a good enough job" or "Should probably be fired"

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