Uber will start deactivating riders with low ratings | Hacker News Reader

Uber will start deactivating riders with low ratings

techcrunch.com

264 pointshbcondo714642 comments

First, using an arbitrary number of stars is part of the problem. Too much opportunity for legitimate differences of rating to come into play. Just make the question "would you do business with this driver/rider again?" and leave it at that. At the very least the rating should be market-specific, since there is so much cultural influence over such ratings.

Second, Uber should not be making the choice based on some arbitrarily chosen numerical value. Present the rating to the drivers, maybe with some comments, let them choose who they want to take. After all, if Uber isn't employing the drivers and is just the middleman, wouldn't they want to avoid being seen as a crucial decision maker?

this is already happening. the driver does see the rating and does decide if they want to pick you up or not. effectively, if you have a low rating you will have troubles getting a ride today without uber banning you.

I think in Uber Pool, the driver is automatically assigned the rides with no confirmation step?

Not always true. Not picking up is highly disincentivized.

I heard from a Uber driver that she was told to avoid passengers that are below 4.7.

Only time she didn't follow the rule, the passenger changed a lot of details during the trip (I don't have money, can we stop a while at some bank while you wait in the car?, Could you take me some blocks ahead?, and some other weird things). And even with she complying with those requests, she got one star in the end.

So, yes, passengers are also rated and some drivers take actions based on that.

I'd probably flat out rate these annoying passengers with one star or maybe even tell them to get a hike.

That happens because of rating inflation. If everyone just used the system where 3 was the average rating instead of 5, then he'd be in a much lower range.

But since everyone got in their heads that anything lower than a 5 is somehow an assault on the other party, 5s are the "average" rating and there is no way to distinguish between average and good. You only know that he was bad enough to get dinged .3 stars over the course of his history with the app.

The issue with this rating inflation is that it's a recursive effect.

If the majority end up treating 5 as average, then you also have to do the same and go with how the majority ends up using the rating system, which in turn forces even more people to use that definition of ratings, and so the cycle continues.

If you hold 3/5 as your average when 5/5 is held as the average for most people, you're just hitting the driver with a "this was awful" effectively.

This rating scale allows for some form of categorisation of the levels of 'badness' of the drive (e.g. differentiating between dangerous driving and jerky driving, between rudeness and general discomfort), but doesn't allow 'above satisfactory' to be separated from good or excellent.

But perhaps that's what Uber is going for with the rating system; maybe their intent is that 5 is meant to be 'above satisfactory' and anything better than that should be a 5 + a tip? If that's not their intent then I have no clue why they haven't redone the rating system already.

Who tells everyone to use that scale though? You're presented with a row of stars. Expecting people to read winds up being a big ask.

Also, those categories are subjective as well. What's the difference between "bad" and "really bad"?

Mutual graded rating systems suck. That's all there is to it. Because no matter what, it turns into currency. "Yes/No" and then base a rating on that. Rotten Tomatoes had it right from the start.

It's interesting that there is a cut-off around 4.70 for some drivers, it seems bizarre then that I have a 4.69 rating. I considered myself the ideal passenger. I'm talkative or quiet to match the driver's personality, always polite, shower before the ride, well dressed, never complained to or made any kind of request from the driver, nearly always rate the driver 5/5. Maybe it's because I don't tip? It's very strange to imagine that I'd be getting automatically declined based on my rating.

Well, this is in my city, I don't know if drivers elsewhere have this kind of informal rule too. This means, more or less, that for 1 ride with 4 stars you need 3 rides with 5 stars.

Or, even worst, that you'll need 13 5-stars to compensate for 1 ride with 1 star...

The cutoff probably varies per city, but I imagine they're only trying to get rid of the lowest percentiles of the distribution.

Honestly though, a 4.7/5 generally sounds good. If a 4.7/5 is near the (very) bottom of the distribution then it sounds like the rating system is quite flawed and should suggest to Uber that they need to replace it (perhaps with just a "would you use this driver again" question, and if no, then whether the cause was behavioural (e.g. odour or some form of rudeness) or dangerous driving), then rank drivers using this. Vice versa for riders.

If the /5 rating system was accurate, then 'good' drivers/riders should be ~3.5-4, excellent drivers 4.2+, and poor drivers 1-2. But since some people have different definitions of 5/5 compared to others the rating system ends up generally turning into a 5/5 for above satisfactory with no real issues, and random usage of the rest of the scale.

It’s because you don’t tip. Why don’t you tip anyway?

I saw my girlfriend rate our driver 3/5 stars for a ride that was perfect. When I asked her what problem she had with the driver to rate him so low, she said "huh? it was just an average ride, nothing special."

I think of this whenever people suggest that a star rating system is ideal.

That's how you'd rate a film. 3 stars for something that's fine, five for something that blows you away.

Plenty of people see 3 stars = Average, 5 = Amazing, but companies have decided that 3 = Bad, 5 = Acceptable.

In my perception that wasn't the idea of any company, but companies just decided to adapt to how the majority of users use the 5-star rating system: basically like a one-star-system, where 5 means "all ok" (1 star), and 1 star means "crap" (0 stars), and in between there's a wasteland nobody uses anyway.

I think it started to go wrong on eBay back in 2000. People gave any seller overly enthusiastic comments on any sale that somehow made its way to their door, as if that was something special and totally unexpected. And the sellers gave best ratings to buyers in return. Soon, both expected the other to provide a perfect rating for any transaction.

Wonder if it started before that to be honest. It's pretty common knowledge that game reviews have ridiculously inflated scores for example, with anything lower than 70% being seen as bad and people not bothering with anything under 80-90% when choosing what to buy.

So perhaps the average for a review score/rating has just steadily crept upwards over time, til the scale collapsed into a two choice system with 'bad' and 'great' being the only options.

Yes, gaming scores were inflated indeed. This gaming magazine from the 90s called Hoog Spel [1] never gave ratings to games. Instead they gave a summary of plus and minus points. Such a summary takes slightly more time to read (but not a lot) and gives the reader a good idea on the positive and negative sides of the story.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoog_Spel

Coincidentally, the inflated subjective scores from game reviews tends to match the percentage of players that rate a game as "recommended" on Steam.

The median rating on Steam is about 80% positive (meaning 80% of players who rated it would recommend it). A game with a 70% Steam rating tends to be mediocre.

It's interesting that even though a rating system where you choose between "recommended" and "not recommended" is much less subjective than trying to rate a game on a scale from 0-100, in aggregate, you get similar scores.

It was eBay indeed which introduced me to this system. eBay is just a symptom though. The problem is fundamental, that a rating does not tell much. Because what you rate 3/5 someone else rates different. Its the same with movie reviews and game reviews. You'd need to read the review in order to understand it. I do that on e.g. Amazon (and my conclusion is often: this writer is clueless).

May harken back to the adoption of net promoter scores. Back then so many companies were giving such terrible service that "average" was bad. So then every interaction needed a 10 out of 10 so you could secure those promoters. So many people came up working at companies where anything below a 9 or 10 reflected bad on their work it doesn't surprise me that max scores became the new norm. You don't want to get any fired, do you?

Ugh, I’d hate to have this kind of system when providing internal support. I like saying things like “The reason why your account isn’t letting you do anything is because you haven’t completed your mandatory training”, without having to spend too much time sugar coating it.

NPS is so horrid. I get ticket responses sometimes with sig lines explaining that anything not a 9/10 in the survey counts as bad for them, and it's so embarassing for the organisation that they have to do this.

Plenty of people see 1 star = not free, 5 = free

> companies have decided that 3 = Bad, 5 = Acceptable.

Does Uber actually give instructions on how to rate? Does it say a normal, acceptable trip should be 3 or 5? What would a really great trip be anyway, perhaps if the driver says "hey, I just won a lottery and I'm celebrating with my passengers, take $10k", or perhaps something sex related?

Once Uber kicks out all the below-average passengers / drivers, will they take into account that the average will be pushed up for those remaining, so they will need to do further rounds of kicking?

They do give pretty clear instructions, and say that a ride that didn’t have any problems should be rated 5 stars.

Yes, 3 stars is "disappointing", for example.

In that case, I'm unclear why the prior-mentioned girlfriend selected the "disappointing" option.

I can't check myself, I've never used Uber. I've been unable to sign up due to some problem where my "email address is already registered", which apparently can't be fixed. I could just use a different email, but I don't really want to deal with a company that has such issues.

I imagine this is fairly common actually.

If it is, it's not difficult to introduce a system to deal with it (and they may already have such a system). All it'd need to do is normalize ratings or at least reduce the weight of negative ratings if the rater always gives negative ratings.

I think they have. For anything that wasn't 5* , you're asked to pick an aspect that sucked to justify it. I think that helps avoid 3* / 4* is "normal" problem. At least for me it did.

Having 3 or 4 stars be normal isn't a problem though. The expectation that 4.6 is normal is a problem that AirBnb, Uber, and more and more companies now are creating. They show 5* ratings on the app to people who just signed up for apps. The average rating should be much lower than 5* in order to not mislead unsuspecting users. I don't expect it to be 3, but a 4 should be considered a good rating, and if it isn't, the app is engaging in false advertising. (Yes, I recognize that my cutoff is arbitrary, but 5 stars is supposed to mean excellent, and it has for time immemorial.)

I wouldn't be surprised if a desired outcome of ubers rating system is to manipulate people into thinking of the rides as excellent by forcing 5's.

They should ask people for justification on 5 star ratings as well, like "What was the absolutely exceptional, one-of-a-kind aspect in this ride?". Because if 5 stars means "everything's normal" and it is the maximum, what do you do to express the deviation from normal into the positive direction?

To me and seemily people my age getting an 'A' or 5/5 means "no problems" not "exceptional".

You don't express derivation in the positive direction because delivering a product or service as described without issue is the highest aspiration. It feels wrong to make anyone dance for their supper.

It's not about making anyone dance - it's about rewarding people for exceptional service. Sometimes, when I pay someone to do some kind of service for me, they go out of their way to be better than average. That is just what happens in human-to-human interactions, and I want to honor that. It's the reason to give a bigger tip than normal (now don't tell me you never did that and always tip whatever is your absolute maximum), and it should also be the reason to give more than the average amount of stars.

Oh, and btw: it's the same the other way round. I also sometimes put much more effort than strictly required into my job for a particular client, and I love it when that is recognized and honored. If it is, I am more inclined to do it again later. If not...well, not so much, then it's probably back to "standard service, just enough to fulfill the contract".

Imagine you are making barely above minimum wage and your entire income depends on your ability to constantly make customers feel like they were serviced "better than average". Sounds incredibly exhausting.

exactly. When you're being driven somewhere, "no problems" is 5/5.

> You don't express derivation in the positive direction because delivering a product or service as described without issue is the highest aspiration.

It's very disturbing to me that the highest aspiration is to just "meet expectations". That seems like motivating everything toward mediocrity.

My highest aspiration is to exceed expectations.

I mean in a general life sense I completely agree but not when were talking about grading others. Setting the bar for perfection at "exceeds my personal ever-changing expectations by an arbitrary unspecified degree" would actually cause me distress to have to carry out. I could never judge another human being in such a way and I would feel, and have felt, degraded being judged that way.

Like why even set expectations in the first place if your bar for perfect is "impress me"? Why is "I did everything you asked" less than perfect?

Who's talking about perfection? Perfection is like zen -- it's a goal that can never actually be achieved, so there's no problem in not achieving it. Striving for it nonetheless is a good thing.

Pretty simply, the answer is to tip them more. While that might not be a publicly visible gesture, the driver will certainly appreciate it.

Many apps, including Uber, now also give the option to commend the driver for things they did well (e.g. cool vehicle, smooth driving, great conversation), which is also an option to express specific positive feedback.

Tips. Or Lyft has some badges you can award people for stuff like good conversation, safe driving, and the like.

But then what happens if someone give a 4 when they always give 5? If your normal is the maximum, it screw quite a bit with the reality.

Tell your girlfriend that Uber drivers might lose their job if they drop to a 4.6 star average. 3 seems savage for a good ride.

"If your rating over the most recent 100 trips is below a 4.6, your profile may be at risk of deactivation."

His girlfriend is trying to make the system useful for communicating both great and terrible service while everyone else has gamed it down to a reporting mechanism. His girlfriend is right and everyone else is wrong.

The drivers income depends on their star rating remaining high. I don't see how it's "right" to jeopardize this.

It is "right" to provide an honest rating. What you seem to be saying is that it is the rider's duty to provide dishonest ratings.

Well I hope giving that 3 makes you feel really good about yourself when the guy did his job and you're just hurting him for it. You know how they are judged and you do it anyway out of some misguided notion of what the rating system _should_ be and an insatiable urge to always be "right".

It makes you a jerk, nothing more really.

> Well I hope giving that 3 makes you feel really good about yourself when the guy did his job and you're just hurting him for it.

Since I had no idea that 3 stars was a bad rating that hurt drivers until I read the comments here, I think that your condescension is very misplaced.

Well yeah, that completely changes things. The comment I responded doesn't exactly make that clear though does it?

>It is "right" to provide an honest rating. What you seem to be saying is that it is the rider's duty to provide dishonest ratings.

That seems to me a staunch defense of doing what you want to do regardless of how it affects the driver.

My comment was intended to point out that the rating system is inherently dishonest. It was not intended to indicate what I would or wouldn't do when rating.

From reading the comments here, though, I think I know what I'll do: opt out of the whole thing and avoid ride-sharing services in the future.

Come on, you have to be pretty fucking naive to assume any large publicly traded corporation is going to to be honest with users or employees.

I wasn't assuming that. I was assuming that the riders and the drivers would generally be honest, though.

It's a dishonest rating when you know that a 5 means normal experience. Then you are just making a point. There is a time and a place to make a point, but for stuff like tipping and star ratings policy changes are the best course of action; not hanging individuals out to dry. If your the only person not leaving somebody tips(and I hate tipping) or giving them 3 stars you're not changing the system, you are just being an asshole.

EDIT: I mean the royal "you", not you specifically. Also, I have been the a'hole before :|

> It's a dishonest rating when you know that a 5 means normal experience.

I agree, in a sense. If you're working with a rating system that is inherently dishonest (as I just learned this one is) by redefining what ratings mean, then it's dishonest to supply a rating that you know means something other than what it should.

I was not advocating doing that.

Unless the company is using the restroom dishonestly, the company is doing it because they want good customer experience from excellent honest ratings; inflated ratings are thus sabotaging everyone else's experience.

If the company is using them dishonestly then inflated ratings are just serving the dishonest purpose.

Moreover, in the honest case (which I do not think applies) if the company is trying to use (known to be highly culturally variable) star ratings as a substitute for a simple binary “you would want to ride again with this driver” flag, they are idiots and overcomplicating what should be simple.

> His girlfriend is trying to make the system useful for communicating both great and terrible service while everyone else has gamed it down to a reporting mechanism. His girlfriend is right and everyone else is wrong.

However, Uber doesn't value star-ratings the way she does, so she is wrong.

I don't disagree with the stupidity around the rating system, but honestly... what would a driver have to do in that world to get a five star rating? Serve you drinks and rub your feet?

It's a car ride, not a movie. A perfect ride... is still just a ride in a car. If they get you there without incident and don't annoy you too much that seems like a 5/5.

> If they get you there without incident and don't annoy you too much that seems like a 5/5.

Here's how the scale I instinctively would use would work: Getting me there without incident and without being too annoying would be a 3. If they don't annoy me at all, that would be a 4. If they do anything that makes my trip better (a better route, a good, relevant suggestion for where to go for something of interest to me, or just making my day a bit brighter), that would be a 5.

Problem of definitions. Personally I don't want any chit chat, so what makes a ride a five for you lowers it for me. At the end of the day I just give service people top marks unless they did something terribly wrong.

Yes, that's the underlying issue with simplistic rating systems like 5-stars -- different people value different things. Even if we all agreed on some standard like "average == 3 stars", everybody has different desires, so my 5-star ride may only be a 3-star for you, and vice-versa.

My favorite Uber ride was in a party van. Great way to get home after long trip at night. In an ideal system I think they'd be a 5/5 while most of my other rides would be 4/5.

A while ago the story went around of an Uber driver who hooked up a Nintendo Switch with Mario Kart in the back seat.

That guy probably deserved a "true" 5-star rating.

Unless she's in the process of joining Uber and working on the feedback component, she's not "trying to make the system useful", she's just refusing to engage with material reality.

Direct action needs to actually affect the people who have the power to make changes. Stubbornly rating drivers 3/5 for a good ride just makes their lives harder, and let's be clear, nobody who is working at Uber gives a shit about that.

Couldn't Uber look at rider rating tendencies and normalize the scores?

This is smart and I wonder if Uber does that, behind the scenes.

Damn, that really does make the rating system almost totally useless.

Uber's only able to set that cutoff because everyone rates 5 no matter what.

If people provided informative ratings, the cutoff would be adjusted. Uber's policies can't make the rating system worthless; the raters are doing it.

This isn't true. Uber has always had a minimum cut-off for driver ratings, and it has always been around 4.6-4.7. Uber set that expectation, not the riders.

So, according to you, if riders started rating drivers on a 2-centered scale, Uber would fire every driver before noticing the shift?

I stand by exactly what I said before: Uber is only able to set the cutoff it does because of rider behavior, and if the rider behavior were different, Uber would adjust to it, not the other way around. The riders have all of the power to determine what ratings mean, and Uber has none of that power, because the riders are the ones who set the ratings. No one at Uber is enough of an idiot to deactivate every driver on the platform because none of them reached a number that Uber made up. Or even to deactivate 70% of drivers because only 30% got perfect ratings.

That's because the riders have always dumbed down the 5-star system into a binary "one-star-or-no-star" system since the inception of Uber. Uber thus had no choice than to set the cutoff at this number.

Uber had the choice to drop the 5-star system and replace it with a thumbs up/thumbs-down system, or a minus/check/plus system, or a “click this if your ride sucked” system.

Uber had lots of other choices, too.

That would be much better. At least it would be obvious to everyone what the rating means.

True, and I would like any of those better than the idiocy that is the 5-star system. But the "no choice" statement was directed at where they set the cutoff in their existing system. With their lie of a rating system, they have to set the cutoff at that point, or they would either not even ban the worst offenders or end up with no drivers at all.

They don't have to use a simple average.

I've never taken an Uber, but that's probably how I also would rate a good, but not exceptional, ride. Just like how I rate movies. So yeah, a star rating for this seems like a bad idea.

The typical Uber driver will serve thousands of passengers. People like your girlfriend drag down every driver's average, but they don't explain why one driver has a 4.8 and another has a 3.5.

On the other hand I rate every single driver 5/5 almost without fail, even if they were rude. I figure if their livelihood relies on it then I'd be an asshole if I didn't metagame the system.

I do the same, unless I feel my life is in danger (reckless driving). Why punish someone who might be working for less than minimum wage?

You aren't metagaming the system, you are being gamed by the system. Uber isn't as concerned that all the drivers are polite, but they do want them all to have near 5-star ratings, so if anything goes badly they can say “Hey, he had great reviews from riders up to that point”. If they guilt you into rating 5-stars for rude service, mission accomplished.

I don't drive Uber, but on Lyft if a driver or passenger gives a 3-star or below rating it's considered such a poor ride that they won't be matched up again. Far from "average."

That genuinely surprises me. I really would have thought 3 stars means "it was fine". This issue would actually make me think twice about using Uber or Lyft. Is it OK not to rate a driver at all?

As of late 2018, if you don't rate your Lyft driver we automatically get a 5-star rating for that ride. That further emphasizes how crucial keeping a high rating to Lyft for the driver.

It genuinely surprises me that you expect more from a ride than getting there.

What makes you think that I expect more than that?

I'm more in line with your girlfriend -- if the majority of ratings I'm giving out aren't 3 stars (on a 5 star system), then I'm doing it wrong. 3 means average, after all.

And I agree with you -- this sort of disparity is why ranking systems like that aren't terribly useful. Take Amazon, for instance. People there seem to weight their ratings according to price, so something that is cheap and mediocre can get 4 or 5 stars.

All of this sort of nonsense taught me to ignore ratings.

This seems like a generational thing but I have never met someone my age or younger that thinks that 3/5 or a 'C' is average.

How people like me give ratings.

5/5 - No problems 4/5 - Minor problems 3/5 - Major problems satisfied 2/5 - Major problems unsatisfied 1/5 - Horrible

How average ratings are interpreted:

4-5: Excellent 3.5-4: Okay <3.5:Terrible

This pretty much mirrors how my grades were given in school.

But how I actually give ratings is 5/5 regardless of problems as long as the service was delivered and 4/5 if not because I have anxiety. I couldn't bare to get a bad rating at my job after a mistake so I don't do it to others.

I must be like you too for 5-point ratings. However on Uber I changed my system to:

"A ride happened." -- 5 stars

"I don't think this driver should be driving anyone anymore." -- 1 star.

I've also reluctantly started giving minor tips in the app depending on whether my own rating is trending down or not, since drivers can and do rate riders lower for not tipping. (They have to rate before they take another ride, but they can retroactively rerate.)

UX pattern-driven tipping pressure is gradually normalizing a "voluntary" (but not really since you are extorted via ratings) layer of non-progressive consumption taxes.

There are now apps and other point-of-sale interfaces which default to 20% for "tips". Nice way to lower labor costs by outsourcing a voluntary fee to your customers, but this mostly destroys the signal/feedback value of the tip and rating.

Do the nudge crowd know they are engaging in semantic pollution, e.g. diluting the value of the data they are spending millions to collect, process and analyze.

> Do the nudge crowd know they are engaging in semantic pollution

Perhaps more importantly, do they care?

> This seems like a generational thing but I have never met someone my age or younger that thinks that 3/5 or a 'C' is average.

I think it's related to school grading systems. anything less than an 'A' means you did something wrong.

I remember when I had my first professional performance review, my manager asked us all to fill out the form ourselves and then discuss the difference between our ratings and his rating of us during the review itself. fresh out of undergrad, I gave myself mostly 5/5s and a couple 4/5s where I thought I needed improvement. I was momentarily shocked when I saw he had given me mostly 3s and a few 4s. he chuckled and explained that the company had very high expectations for software devs and that I wouldn't be getting any 5/5s in my first six months on the job unless I happened to be steve wozniak in the body of a 22 year old.

But isn't school grading the exact opposite? Of course anything less than A means you did something wrong. But the test expects you to do something wrong! Failing to complete some of the tasks correctly is normal, expected and exactly what almost all students end up doing, at least semi-regularly. We are imperfect humans after all, not robots.

It's the same with services like Uber driving. There's always room for improvement, I expect the driver to make some "mistakes". Not the kind of life-threatening mistakes, of course, but more like "he could have been 30 seconds faster if he hadn't driven so sluggish" or "she may have treated my luggage with a little more care". And stuff like that is perfectly acceptable, at least as long as it doesn't all happen in the same ride. But a perfect, 5/5 ride must not contain any aspect at all that could have been improved by the driver in order to justify it's rating, and I haven't seen many of those.

everyone has different experiences in school of course, but at the two undergrad institutions I attended it was pretty much always the case that aptitude for the subject combined with a reasonable effort (ie, turning in completed homework and some studying for exams) would result in an A for the class. only the kids who totally slacked off or were in the wrong major would get Cs or worse.

Right, which is why 93%+ is typically considered an 'A' but if you get less than an 'A' it means you failed to meet expectations.

I feel like this standard is very different from my experience with professors that actually expected you to get things wrong and compensated by making tests where there were, say, 130 marks available and you needed to take 93 for an A.

It feels weird to me that a 5/5 is for you means "couldn't be improved" because for me it just means "I got from point A to point B with my body and possessions undamaged."

> Right, which is why 93%+ is typically considered an 'A' but if you get less than an 'A' it means you failed to meet expectations.

Of all of the very surprising things I've learned in this thread, this is perhaps the most surprising to me.

In my view, getting less than an "A" doesn't mean you failed to meet expectations. Getting less than a "C" means that. Getting an "A" means that you performed at an exceptional level.

But there's clearly a generational shift involved in this that I hadn't noticed before now, and I think it's clearly for the worse. If "A" means "Pass" and everything else means "Fail", then there's no reason to have grades at all. Everything should just be pass/fail.

> Right, which is why 93%+ is typically considered an 'A' but if you get less than an 'A' it means you failed to meet expectations.

This is a really strange concept to me. So wherever you went to school, most students were always able to get 93% or more points in tests, so they "met expectations"? And there was almost nobody who managed to exceed expectations, so it wasn't necessary to keep some of the grades reserved for these people?

I can give some insight in the situation in Germany, where I live. We don't have grades A-F, but 1-6, with A=1, B=2 and so on. So it's basically the same system, just with numbers. But: there are textual expressions as well for each of the numbers. The one for the grade 4, or 'D', is "ausreichend", which means "sufficient" in German, and in the long explanation it is described as being the grade someone gets if he just managed to meet the expectations. So if you got anything above that grade, it means you were above the expectations, and if you were below, you failed to meet expectations. Typically, tests were designed such that 50% correct answers give the grade 4 and are thus expected from each student. The other 50% should be hard enough to get right so that getting a significant share of them right proves that you managed to exceed the expectations.

I guess this design should encourage students to improve themselves and to push themselves beyond the minimum expectations of teachers. By setting aside the largest part of the rating scale (1-4) to honor greatness and using just the smaller part (4-6) to punish laziness, people should rather be motivated by positive feedback instead of by punishment, which is clearly negative feedback.

> fresh out of undergrad, I gave myself mostly 5/5s and a couple 4/5s where I thought I needed improvement.

Wow, I never would have expected that. I would only give myself (or expect) a 5/5 if I was really awesome in that category. On a 1-5 scale, the majority of my self-ratings would probably be 3s, with 2s for areas where I know I'm weak, and 4s for areas where I know I'm strong.

Ratings of 1 and 5 are, to me, reserved for the very end of each extreme. 1 means "nothing could be worse", and 5 means "nothing could be better".

it was certainly an embarrassing moment at the time, but I had gotten perfect scores on all my coding assignments in school, so I expected similar on my first performance review. also, when we did evaluations of our professors at the end of each semester, they would always explain that anything less than a 5/5 was basically fucking them over and we better have a good reason for the rating.

it's hard to understand what a rating out of five actually means unless someone takes the time to explain it in plain english.

> they would always explain that anything less than a 5/5 was basically fucking them over and we better have a good reason for the rating.

In my view, that is an unconscionable level of unprofessionalism. I'd rate any professor who told me that lower just because they told me that -- and say why.

definitely unprofessional, but every last one of them explained it that way. made me think that they were just victims of an unreasonable system. maybe I was naive.

I always give myself perfect scores on any self-review.

If my manager wants to give me a lower score, that's not something I'm offended by; though I fully expect them to explain - in detail - all my shortcomings that resulted in their determination. I'll push back on just about all of their examples, even if I actually agree with their assessment.

I want my performance reviews to be as objective as possible. In my opinion, others should feel as though they have to convince me that I'm an imperfect employee, because they do.

Realistically, what does one have to gain by not defending themselves?

> I always give myself perfect scores on any self-review.

If I were the one performing employee evaluations, this would be a big red flag to me (unless you really were exceptional in all areas). It would indicate to me that you lack an awareness of your actual performance, and lacking that is significant. If someone can't reasonably evaluate how they're doing, then they can't reasonably be expected to be able to improve themselves in the areas where improvement is desired.

> 5/5 - No problems 4/5 - Minor problems 3/5 - Major problems satisfied 2/5 - Major problems unsatisfied 1/5 - Horrible

But that makes it impossible to indicate when something is great.

Also _regional_. Mirroring how my grades were given as school would be >40% - pass, > 80% - exceptional. Example grade boundaries[1]: 71/180, or 39.4% - pass; 88/180, or 48.9% - a strong pass[2]. Top grade is 147/180, or 81.7%.

[1] https://qualifications.pearson.com/content/dam/pdf/Support/G...

[2] https://www.aqa.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/policy/gcse-and-a...

The problem when it comes to uber/lyft in particular is that as the customer you're never really comparison shopping scores the way you can on amazon, yelp, etc. The audience for the scores is Uber itself, not other customers. So the real question isn't "how was the ride", it's "do I want to fuck with this person's livelihood." If the answer is no, there's no reason not to give 5 stars.

> So the real question isn't "how was the ride", it's "do I want to fuck with this person's livelihood." If the answer is no, there's no reason not to give 5 stars.

If that's the actual game that Uber & Lyft expect people to be playing (as it appears that it is), then screw that. I'm not going to be using the services at all.

I never thought of it that way. I always think of it like the A thru F grading scale back in high school. But from your girlfriends perspective, nobody gets a 5 unless they went out of their way to make the ride special. I actually like that much better.

1. The grading system in school is supposed to / used to be very similar, in that a C was actually average and very few people got As.

2. I don't want the driver to do anything "special", and I can't even imagine what that would be. Balloons? Played my favorite song on the radio? Just get me from here to there, I'm looking for transportation not an "experience".

The thought of only special, out of the ordinary rides getting a 5/5 is amusing to me. That's absolutely not the culture I want to experience as a rider. Even above-average levels of conversation can be distracting when I just want to quietly think about what I'll be doing at my destination. My ratings are basically either 5/5 or 1/5.

regarding 2), it's certainly fine if all you want is a ride from A to B, but there are plenty of other things that meaningfully improve the ride for me. maybe the driver is actually familiar with the area and knows a faster or more pleasant route than the one google maps picks. maybe it's a long ride and you have a genuinely interesting conversation that helps pass the time. maybe it's a hot day and they have bottled water in a cooler. maybe they have a much more comfortable car than you expected.

there should be room to acknowledge people that go above and beyond the requirements of their job without being punitive towards the people who do a fine but unremarkable job. I tip most drivers who don't completely fuck up the transportation part of the job, and I tip extra for really good rides, but I wish there were a way to recognize this in the ratings too.

Although "grade inflation" distorts this, the way it's supposed to be is that only a small percentage of students get "A"s. A means "exceptional", after all, and by definition most people aren't "exceptional".

They might be by yesterday’s standards (Flynn effect and all).

Flynn effect or not (and the evidence supporting the Flynn effect is weak at best), most people are not exceptional.

Even if the average is rising, the average is still the average. Only people far above average are "exceptional", even if the average person of today would be considered "exceptional" 100 years ago.

The normal distribution curve may (or may not) be sliding along the scale, but its shape doesn't change.

Uber could certainly be doing more to give an operational definition of what the stars mean.

It's a difficult UX and communication problem, I'll grant. But I saw several unforced errors on their part, like (from memory) marketing copy about "Uber only allows exceptional drivers on our platform". Um, no dude. That sounds nice, but it doesn't lead to usable ratings.

> It's a difficult UX and communication problem, I'll grant

Is it?

It seems to me that they could just use imoji-like images instead of stars, ranging from Angry for the lowest rating to Ecstatic for the highest. The 3 star position would be neutral.

Yes, it is, because of wide variation in what experience someone will associate with and expect for a given face.

This is slightly detrimental to the driver. Anything less than 5-stars is basically negative.

I’ve had a perfect 5.0 rating over 500 rides but would occasionally get lower ratings or 1-star for reasons I didn’t know. Bad smell outside comes through the vent? May a strong short stop in ridiculous traffic?

The ratings were meaningless to me, there’s no actionable result you can make. It just tormented me with some anonymous, ambiguous criticism of a already super stressful job that paid $20/hour.

Ideally it looks at the delta from the average scores that you awarded when determining de-activations.

I feel like that's giving Uber far too much credit.

I am surprised that nobody has mentioned the Netflix rating system which seems more accurate. Netflix scales the rating against your other ratings. If you always say 3 = OK then 5 = great. If you always say 5 = does not suck then 3 = sucks but not horrible.

I don't even rate AirBNB hosts (for instance) because I know that a good enough host will be punished. I only rate the top and the bottom because those are the only two ratings that have meaning any more.

That would only work as long as they're not figuring null ratings into the score, which would still decrease the host's average.

I'm not sure how it works for either company - is it (transactions/rating score) or (ratings/rating score)? Downthread, we learn that Lyft gives null ratings an automatic 5.

Time to invent the bell curve..

Netflix switched to a thumbs up / thumbs down rating system in 2017:

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-netflix-replaced-its-5-s...

People got very mad at this, but it seems preferable. Movies/TV shows that you "like a lot" versus movies that you "just like" are both movies that you'd watch, and watching is what you're buying.

Not getting enough ratings also causes punishment.

I really like grab for this reason. I have a friend who will think an Uber driver should get a 3/5 stars for a ride that was perfect fine. If you give a non-perfect rating in grab, it asks for a specific reason why, giving you a dialog with common reasons why. If you give a low enough rating, grab will reach out to you to understand what happened during the ride and to try to make things right.

> Uber should not be making the choice based on some arbitrarily chosen numerical value

It’s tough to judge the measure without understanding the distribution. Uber has to compete for drivers. They aren’t incentivised to throw them away without good reason.

Most people I know default to 5 stars. Anything below means something went wrong.

(I do 4 for nuisances, like odour; 3 for discomfort, like jerky driving; 2 for minor safety issues, like being on the phone; and 1 for major safety issues, like threatening my fellow Pool passenger or nearly hitting a pedestrian lawfully using the crosswalk. Maybe once every few weeks I’ll rate a ride less than 5.)

FWIW I’ve heard that a rating of 3 or less for the driver ensures that you are never matched with them ever again.

> Just make the question "would you do business with this driver/rider again?"

FWIW I’ve heard that a rating of 3 or less for the driver ensures that you are never matched with them ever again.

100% agree. Uber drivers should be able to tag a passenger as "do not accept requests from". Maybe they can; I'm not sure if the driver app has that functionality. But if they truly are contractors, they should be able to pick & choose their clients, so to speak.

I think I like the binary choice.

I also think it'd be better to flip it around. These services could ask if anything went wrong, e.g., "Did the driver do anything dangerous?" or "Was the driver discourteous?" Likewise for the rider.

Since we're saying anything less than 5 stars is a problem, might as well ask explicitly problems, and if it's not big enough to be worth reporting, we just assume it was good enough.

For a good while, and possibly still, Domino's Pizza stores were graded on a yes/no "would recommend" (iirc).

I agree, there are cultural and market issues at play. It should as simple as would you drive this person y/n, or anything less arbitrary than the current. I spent some time in foreign markets where Uber no longer exists and my rating took a hit for not knowing the language or being a foreigner, or something. There should be a way to at least correct that.

Add to that, in the states now some drivers will rate lower if you don’t tip. I mostly tip and the one and only time I’ve rated a driver low was when he was blasting music, twitching and doing some disco move right turns that were frightening to everyone in the car.

My Uber passenger rating is 4.57. I have no idea whether that's good or bad. I'm typically at pick-up points before the drivers are, I sometimes chat with drivers, I always wear my seatbelt, I sit in the back, and I don't make a mess or cause any problems. It's hard to know what I could be doing to get a better rating beyond just bribing drivers with cash tips at the end of the ride. I tend to rate every driver a 5 unless they clearly did something wrong, like insane driving (which happens rarely).

I'd be curious to know what the passenger cut-off ratings are, and what thus what kind of behavior is actually kicking people off the app.

Also, if there's some inherent racial or other protected class bias in the kinds of ratings that people get, then Uber could be in a world of trouble here.

In my experience what's considered a good or bad rating seems to depend on where in the world you are. I've noticed that people seem to average lower ratings in Poland for example than the UK.

It seems kind of low. The worst of my friends have 4.7s and most are in the 4.8-4.9 range.

This is strange. I'm always on time, on location and drivers usually appreciate the fact that I'm always exactly where I say I'll be when they arrive. The trips are completely uneventful. The only thing they could possibly not like about me is that I'm a boring passenger. My rating is 4.67. So I just assume that's a good rating!

This went to Blackmirror level very fast.

the good news is you will get invited to a wedding as a 4.6 to show that the 4.9 doesn't look down on you for extra credit

I wonder if it's a city thing? I'm in NYC. I'd be curious to know the average rating here vs the average rating in California.

Definitely regional. When I was in NYC I always got lower ratings when going from Manhattan to Queens, even while tipping well with cash. Bay Area? Went up to an almost perfect score (even going from San Francisco to Oakland frequently), people acted surprised when I tipped cash, etc.

I'm probably getting punished for dragging drivers out of Manhattan then -- which I do all the time when going to airports. Oh well. If it's proportional to the area then I'm probably still doing OK.

I have a 4.7 and I'm always prompt, polite, always tip, and always give a 5 star rating (unless they literally put my life in danger).

I take short trips, that's the only reason I can think of for a low rating.

It's hard to know why they rated you in that way for getting 4.57 Maybe phoned someone and talked too loud, or they missclicked.. Who knows, but try to get an answer for that "low rating", maybe you could know who gave you that rating and try to fix it.

Third paragraph:

> For drivers, they face a risk of deactivation if they fall below 4.6

They’re using a different, undisclosed bar for passengers though.

One thing I know riders may do inadvertently which aggravates drivers is slamming the door when you get out. Many are unaware of it, but it's quite annoying to the driver.

For me, I often rate drivers below 5 for the following common reasons:

  1. Check engine light is on.
  2. TPMS sensor light is on (major safety risk)
  3. Poor routing choices (deviations outside the directed route)

These are professional drivers so I hold them to professional standards with respect to: maintaining their equipment, maintaining a safety standard, and knowing navigation.

Edit: Yes TPMS is super flaky. I own three cars equipped with TPMS and I've invested a great deal of time/money in maintaining them. But I keep them all in working condition. I can only assume that some of you poo-poo'ing TPMS are unaware of the Firestone Ford Debacle that caused close to 300 deaths [1]. Under inflated tires are no-joke. Suggesting that it's ok to defeat a critical safety system is laughable. Also I live in CA so it's not a snow-tire issue.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_and_Ford_tire_contro...

If TPMS is tire pressure, then you are being unfair. There are cars like Toyota and Audi that have sensors that don't work well and even frequent service can't keep them off (to the point where some will not-quite-suggest disabling them).

So if you are going to downgrade for that, at least have a look at the tires directly and see if one is obviously lower than the others.

If the driver has snow tires, they're a safer driver than one with all-weather and a blank dash.

You can get TPMS on a second set of wheels. I have them on my snow tires and they were like $80.

For mine, I had to pay for a TPMS reset every tire change. This isn't worth it.

TPMS reset is usually holding a button and typically in your driver's manual for the vehicle. Found this out myself when my tires got replaced and they couldn't reset my TPMS sensors.

I have a tool to reset them myself, I think it was free from Tire Rack when I bought the tires. It's like a keyfob and pretty simple to use, you just hold down a button.

It would be worth looking into getting.

I always swap my own tires in the summer/winter because it takes me less time to do it than to drive to the shop. TPMS, but it can be such a pain.

My previous car, 2010 VW I could switch from summer to winter wheels/tires and drive away. TPMS would figure it out just fine. Now I have a Subaru and am debating buying a $100 tool to reset them. It won't take long to pay for itself, but as it is now, the light is still on.

Worse, my Ram has positional sensors and I haven't seen any "cheap" tools. It happens to be the same set of wheels, but I rotated them and it expects different pressure in the front vs rear. The light is on and it yells at every start because the rear tires are underinflated. How hard can it be for a car to learn which tire is on which corner of the vehicle?

In California, summer tires get the best traction and all-seasons are generally worse (many people mistakenly believe that all-seasons perform better than summer in the rain, I suppose because winter is the rainy season here).

I guess it depends on what part of California you're talking about but all-seasons will generally outperform equivalent grade summer tires in the rain if temperatures start falling below 50-55° or so. A summer tire's grip falls off precipitously [1] when temperatures reach 40-45° but the loss of grip in that "NorCal winter" kind of weather can reduce their performance below that of all seasons. Just because they haven't lost a dangerous amount of grip doesn't mean they haven't fallen behind the grip available to a tire with a more temperature insensitive compound.

[1]: https://m.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=27...

Agreed, I should have specified that all-seasons are the safe option in some parts of California. My frame of reference is the warm climates of Silicon Valley and SoCal. Summer tires could even lose traction in one of the colder nights in a San Jose winter.

I'm betraying my ignorance but I thought SV/SF were relatively temperate climates. Nothing like Seattle, but still 50 low to 75 high most of the time?

in theory, the difference between summers and all-seasons is the rubber compound used. all things being equal, the summer compound will perform better when it's hot outside. in reality, most people in the US just don't care and run all-seasons year round. people tend to only buy summer tires for performance-oriented vehicles, so the tires offered with summer compound tend to be aggressive tires with less tread. if you pick a summer tire at random, it may well be less capable than an all-season tire in the rain. the superior compound can't grip if it can't evacuate enough water from the contact patch.

FYI, there is a difference between all-weather and all-season tires.

https://info.kaltire.com/all-weather-vs-all-season-vs-winter...

Tire pressure sensors are super flaky. Mine come on randomly all the time, and after the first few dozen times I stopped to put a real gauge on them and saw that all four were right at the rated pressure, I've gotten to the point where I just ignore it and punch the button on the dash to hide the warning. It's the kind of false negative feedback that is especially unhelpful.

It doesn't help that it is completely opaque what the thresholds are for when the warning light goes off; I also don't know whether one is supposed to recalibrate anything if you change the type of tire that you are running - for instance, I run snow tires during the winter that have a different PSI rating than my all-seasons the rest of the year...

You car manufacturer should be setting the psi, rather than the tire manufacturer. There are indeed manufacturers who recommend higher pressure on winter tires for that car model, but it's still the model and not the tire that drives it. (Tires have a max inflation pressure, but the recommended pressure comes off the door jamb of your car.)

Or behind the fuel door (Volkswagen; took me months to find it).

I now have a Civic which just has a generic "tire pressure low" warning, but on my previous car, a Dodge Dart, it told me the pressure for each tire.

TPMS is also relatively easy to reset (just read the manual) it does not require professional service. You usually do need to do it seasonally due to fluctuations in outside temp. Drivers should really be aware of it.

Mechanical failure is a fart in a hurricane compared to human factors when it comes to safety. I'm not gonna ding anyone for being too cheap to put TPMS sensors in their snow tire rims. I'm not gonna ding anyone for a CEL either. 95% of the time it's basically just complaining that an emissions system is not in an optimal state. In a work vehicle setting you do not fix this when it happens. You plan a time in the future to take the vehicle down for maintenance, just like patching a prod system.

In a non-work vehicle, I imagine most people do the same. My wife's car has the MIL/CEL lit for the last 6 weeks for a failed knock sensor. I ordered the part and will probably change it this weekend, but we're not parking it and it's not a safety or even an emissions concern.

The CEL being on isn't enough for me to ding a driver but I've also never received an Uber ride where the CEL was on but the car was in otherwise top condition. There is definitely enough of a correlation between a CEL being on and the car having a blown suspension (bushings, struts, CV joints), some engine belt or accessory with a bearing about to fail, or brake pads so worn it's basically riding on nothing but the wear indicators (squealers). Sometimes I even get lucky and get all three.

Maybe it's reasonable to report the CEL in that situation since it's something most riders will notice and can easily be verified by Uber with a photo unlike the condition of the mechanical bits themselves.

"TPMS sensor light is on (major safety risk)"

It really isn't. (very) low tire pressure is a major safety risk. The TPMS sensors I've had all seem to go off at minor deviations (few psi) from the tire pressure; deviations that aren't a safety risk.

A useful reminder that the winter is coming, but hardly a major safety risk.

Close to 300 people died [1] in the 90s due to improperly inflated tires. Sorry, but I don't screw around with safety factors like this when I'm being hurled down freeway interchanges at 70 mph.

> The TPMS sensors I've had all seem to go off at minor deviations

Good (IMHO)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestone_and_Ford_tire_contro...

300 deaths seems like a very insignificant figure to be worked up over.

Seriously. Ten times that number die in traffic accidents in the US daily.

If that's your level of risk sensitivity, don't get in a car.

What? About 100 people die from road vehicles per day in the US, not 3000.

Ah sorry, that's the global statistic, not the US statistic.

Still, both statistics illustrate the point - 300 deaths a few decades ago involving faulty tires that may have been exacerbated by manufacturer-recommended underinflation have basically 0 bearing on the marginal risk of driving with a TPMS warning light illuminated.

Uh no, according to your own source they died because of tread separation caused by a number of factors, one of which may have been underinflation. But in this example the 'underinflated' value was manufacturer recommended, so a TPMS wouldn't have helped anyways.

TPMS modules are insanely flaky. That light will pop for reasons ranging from synchronization issues to using a spare without a module (not the donut!)..none of which impact safety at all.

Same with "check engine." My last car had the check engine light on from years 3 to 15, when I sold it. The reason was a faulty sensor but the actual mechanics were sound and not worth fixing.

I'm amused that you think you're holding drivers to professional standards. Professionals know when to ignore the dummy lights intended for the masses...

...which is not to say you should change anything, because Uber drivers ARE the masses, so it makes little sense to treat them like professionals!

Uber simply organized hitchhiking.

> My last car had the check engine light on from years 3 to 15, when I sold it. The reason was a faulty sensor but the actual mechanics were sound

Some Nissan models used to have a fun version of this where the check engine light came on to notify you about a problem with... the check engine light. It was a bug, obviously, but not a sensor wrongly detecting a fault. Rather, the car's only way of saying "if something goes wrong the check engine light might not activate" was to activate the check engine light.

Whatever the underlying issue, I assume software, replacing sensors didn't work and resetting the light would only last for a few hundred miles. It was effectively impossible to keep the light working, so the mechanic-recommended fix was to just disable it.

> so the mechanic-recommended fix was to just disable it.

Which can make it impossible to pass state emissions/safety testing, because they expect to see all the lights turn on at power-up.

The trick is to rewire the light to some other light instead ;)

Hitchhiking and realtime carpooling is not the same experience. Former is random car, random passenger; latter is known car, random passenger.

Not really. I don't have the ability to choose which car I ride in with Uberpool. I have limited ability to choose what car I ride in when I carpool the normal way via Bay Area casual carpool stops (I can refuse to get in the next car in line, and that's about it). And, in either of those scenarios, the most important factor (the driver) is essentially random as well.

Please see my edit regarding known deaths resulting from improperly inflated tires.

> That light will pop for reasons ranging from synchronization issues

Yes that exactly correct. It's based on an engineering principle called fail-safe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-safe

When the light is on, you have no assurance that the tires are properly inflated. Period. If the TPMS light is off, you can be well-assured that tires are inflated properly.

Yes, the system is finicky (by design). Yes the system can be costly to maintain (I do it myself it's it expensive and time-consuming). These are the responsibilities one must take on if they wish to be transporting the public.

>When the light is on, you have no assurance that the tires are properly inflated

I mean, you could always, you know, check. With a tire pressure gauge. Like on every car ever that didn't have this TP thingy. Honestly, you don't even need to do that - if the tire is low enough to be a safety risk, it will be visibly flat.

Would you down-rate an Uber just for not having this sensor at all?

TPMS is a US requirement. I drive a Canadian car that detects if the tire speeds have gone out of sync and reports if there’s an anomaly.

Doesn’t always work for gradual pressure loss, and doesn’t tell me which tire, but that’s what the gauge is for.

My Jaguar will throw a Check Engine for Fuel Cap Insufficiently Tightened.

any vehicle with an evap system will. it's an emissions thing

The rubber on the cap eventually cracks as well. I wonder if Vaseline or something would make it young again.

That can't be a very expensive part to replace. May as well do it.

I agree. Worth a try. Worst case scenario, I’m out $15.

It isn’t like these doors tensions are standardized. How much pressure to apply to the trunk door of this car you’ve never ridden in before? No idea, it might even be the auto closing kind. Thankfully, most Ubers are priuses, but not always.

That's why you should push doors/trunks/hatches closed and not throw/shove/fling them. I don't mean "push", as in close it like your closing the front door after sneaking home after curfew in high school. I mean it more like keep your hand on the door and slowly accelerate until you've given it enough momentum.

You aren’t pushing so much as pulling. It is much more difficult to control from the inside. Anyways, I just don’t ride in enough cars to get used to the different tensions (maybe if I took Uber more). Also, it always seems to be the American sedans that have the most problems, which we don’t have too many of on the west coast.

I can understand that. Honestly, my experience with modern midsize sedans (Altima in particular, Accord, Camry, Sonata, etc) is that the manufacturers view the rear doors as throwaway areas for "engineering" weight out of the car. The rear doors on these cars honestly weigh about half what the fronts weigh and they fly open and close as if made of paper maché.

I'd encourage you not to rate low over the TPMS sensor light - it's far from a guarantee of actually low tire pressure.

On many cars, TPMS sensor problems cause the light to blink at startup, then stay on steadily just like you had a low tire. That includes "the tire doesn't have a sensor", which can save about $200 on each valve stem. Given how quickly an Uber driver can rack up mileage, I wouldn't be surprised if many of them are just saving money on tires by getting sensor-less ones.

(Admittedly you can't tell if they're checking the pressure manually; I would think so to save on tire lifespan, but it's obviously not guaranteed. Of course, not seeing the light isn't a guarantee either.)

Tires are just pieces of rubber. The sensor is attached to the wheel and stays in place after tires get changed.

If you buy a set of wheels dedicated to winter tires, then you can swap between summer and winter in thirty minutes at home.

Otherwise, you need to put your dirty tires in the back seat, drive to a shop, pay $100 and wait for an hour or two to get them swapped and balanced.

Yep, that. I guess TPMS for the winter rims would be a one-time cost that should outlast the tires, but it's still pretty common to not get it. An extra ~$800 up front, last time I had a tire replaced the sensor ended up damaged anyway, and if your winter tire pressure is different it'll just complain uselessly anyway.

Plus, if you're already spending >$1000 for winter tires/wheels, it's hard to justify TPMS on top of that.

And if you're paying that much for the added safety/performance, you're not the kind of person who needs TPMS to nag them into inflating to the proper pressure.

If you're spending >$1000 on tires, how is a $80 set of TPMS hard to justify?

Presumably you're buying snow tires for safety reasons. Proper tire pressure is important for traction, thus safety. And winter is the time when tire pressure fluctuates the most.

> And winter is the time when tire pressure fluctuates the most

genuinely curious, why? I thought tire pressure fluctuations were linearly related to air temperature fluctuations. does the temperature vary more in the winter than in the summer?

At least in some of the US, quite a bit more. Winter might be swings of >50F, especially night to day, while summer variation is likely to be <40F. I'm not what all weather patterns factor into that, but a major part is that winter air is dryer, and water vapor does a lot to 'buffer' brief temperature changes.

That said, I mostly end up checking my tires more in the winter because I care more; if a tire is only a few pounds low I'd still prefer to handle it before I have to go drive on snow during a cold snap.

Sure, but if you’re the kind of person who buys winter tires (which IME is pretty rare in the widwest USA), you probably know that and check your pressure every couple weeks. And it probably only fluctuates a couple PSI which is well within safe bounds.

Sensors are frequently and unavoidably damaged during unmounting. Many shops just replace the sensors as a matter of course when replacing the tire, since there is no way to test the sensor until the new tire is mounted and inflated.

> which can save about $200 on each valve stem.

What kind of car requires $200 TPMS sensors? Most are in the $35-$55 range, even on very high end cars.

Hell, even my dealership "only" charges $80 per wheel. Though we quickly learned the local tire shop does them for $40 a pop with a much quicker service. I generally just let the dealer service our car since there's not many mechanics in the area qualified to service hybrids anyway, but hell if I'm letting them rip us off on anything related to the tires again (even though their prices for Toyota factory tires are quite fair, I'm not paying an extra $40 a tire for the sensors when we buy a new set).

my favorite was the TPMS on my spare was alerting, unfortunately my car while it had TPMS did not state which wheel it was on.

> TPMS sensor light is on (major safety risk)

Not necessarily, it could be that the sensor is either defective or missing, which doesn't mean the tire pressure is wrong.

Exactly. The light being on means "You don't know" if your tires are safe. Light off, means "You positively know your tires are safe".

Read about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-safe

Or you positively know rhat the light has been physically disabled, which is trivial on most cars.

Regardless, it seems an incredibly insensitive thing to give a poor rating over.

Or the car doesn't have TPMS... Like any car I have ever owned...

These TPMS sensors do add a significant price increase on the tires, which most people I know about choose to avoid at the expense of this "lights on".

We do have to swap our tires for winter tires up north, so I'm not getting tires with the sensors.

I'd suggest adding #4. Not using turn signals. This makes things slightly less safe for everyone else on the road (including peds + bikers) and it costs the driver nothing to properly signal.

Well in some places, you will be rating %95 of drivers below 5 stars then, since nobody uses turn signals in those cities.

Well then 95% of the drivers in some cities are terrible and deserve it.

I highly doubt that 95% claim though.

Come to most large cities in america!

I live in Manhattan, and signaling compliance is way higher than 5%.

California then?

I googled "Firestone Ford" before reading to the end of the sentence and seeing your link, and amazingly, the first result is a woman named "Martha Firestone Ford" [1], whose name comes from the same business relationship that produced the debacle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Firestone_Ford#Family

Mine is 4.77, though I don't use uber that much. I'm also pretty sure they display a recent average, with old (>1 year?) rides not counting.

I also feel compelled to give drivers 5 stars because people IMO tend to look down at anything less than the best. I realize it's not the most accurate comparison, but would you buy from an ebay/amazon reseller who had a 80% approval rating?

There’s no way to know what the reasons are for the reviews either way. Sometimes the app messes up the location it sends drivers to, is the driver faulting me and giving me a lower rating? Does the driver not like the conversation? I think for an effective feedback loop you need to provide a reason. As others have mentioned, I too only give drivers 5 stars.

It’s very subjective. The driver could be thinking you’re rude or not social enough even though that’s not your intention.

I’ve noticed that my friends who are not great at marketing themselves usually have a lower rating.

Here’s the thing: if someone doesn’t want to chat should that affect their access to a paid service?

With Uber you’re paying for a professional driver (they’re being paid, so they’re a pro by definition) to take you from A to B. There shouldn’t be any obligation to engage in anything but pleasantries.

I don’t think social/asocial will factor enough to get anyone booted from the platform.

I think I'm social enough, but who knows. I always respond with conversation when they're interested.

But this is their job, and I'm paying for the service with my money. It's not the passenger's responsibility or obligation to socialize with the driver. The passenger's responsibility is to be there on time, not mess up the car, and pay.

I took an Uber a few weeks ago (I don't often) and right when I got in the driver asked me I was new to Uber and if this was my second/third trip. I said no, I had taken it a good amount of times, just not often. He seemed surprised and said I had a 5 star rating, which he thought was rare for riders. At that point I didn't know I could see my own rating in the app but I looked and I do have a 5 star rating. This was only what one driver said in one city but I guess it could be rarer?

I've got a 5 star rating as well. I pretty much only take it from to and from the airport, I'm always on time at the spot I'm supposed to be and always tip. I just thought this was normal.

I've heard that Uber drivers will sometimes give low ratings to people who take short trips. A ride-share form has someone who seems to have high-ish reputation backing that up [1].

[1]: https://ride.guru/lounge/p/do-uber-drivers-give-negative-rat...

I might be suffering from the opposite problem then. I live in NYC and walk/bike most places; I only rarely even take the subway. When I'm taking rideshare it's almost always to/from airports (here and elsewhere). I definitely don't use it for short trips. And given how often taxi drivers don't want to take you to airports, I can imagine Uber drivers might not like that either? It can certainly take them far out of their way.

That's a NYC problem, because the airports are so inconveniently placed.

This happened to me. I had a 5 star rating until I started using Uber for work travel to/from a busy airport that I live close to. A driver could easily spend 20+ minutes getting to me before they could spend the 15 minutes driving me to my destination for $10. This tanked my rating down to around 4 stars for a while. I was relatively new to Uber so it was easy to check my rating after a ride and do the math to see when I was getting a 1 star review averaged into my rating.

I started tipping the drivers cash which helped, but then I realized it was easier to just use a taxi at the airport. It would only cost a few dollars more, and I wouldn't have to wait for the driver to get through 20 minutes of airport traffic to pick me up. I also didn't have to worry about my rating if I pissed off the driver (especially for short airport fares the drivers seem to like telling me that their credit card machine was broken. Argue with them a bit and the machine magically starts working).

I heard of some Uber drivers who gave lower rating if a customer was paying by credit card. Seems to be local thing though.

How is that an effective repercussion without them also telling you that they're giving you a lower rating for that reason? Do they expect you to somehow intuit over time based on meticulously checking your score after each ride and doing the math?

A lower score acted as a signal to other drivers signifying the fact that a specific customer tended to pay by credit card.

I found out by talking with some other drivers who revealed such a scheme. It was discussed on local passenger forums as well.

I try to see what rating I get before I leave the vehicle.

Anytime I get a low rating, I reciprocate with the same, or lower.

If I were creating the rules to analyze this data, I'd have to question the entries that were the difference between the driver and passenger is high.

How can you see what rating you get before leaving a reciprocal rating? I don't see any sort of way to see individual ratings on a per-trip basis.

With 3 digits of precision, not a massive amount of rides, each rating will make it go up or down.

Won’t work too well if you frequently take a lot of rides.

Sneaky but you can casually linger in the car for an extra second; most drivers rate you right as you're getting out, with a phone that's usually mounted within eyeshot of passenger seats.

The ones who will give you 5 stars usually do it right away in front of you; if they seem weirdly secretive about it, you're probably not getting 5 stars.

I had a roughly 5.0 rating over a hundred or so rides in the Midwest US, but mine dropped to around 4 after taking 30-40 Ubers in India. It was a different experience there, and I always wondered if rating scales are different culturally (and we did have some GPS/language barrier difficulty, as well as some drivers who refused to be paid with Uber and made us give them cash that I’m sure affected it), but the ratings still stay with you global.

That could be part of it. I do a fair bit of international travel, and some of it could either be cultural ratings differences or just frustration over communication difficulties.

We have the same experience, our rating while in Asia was around solid 4.6 while after 3 months in Europe went up to 4.85. Our guess is that in EU, people tend to either give 5 stars or no rating, while in Asia if we had a bit worse ride, we and people around us had no hesistation of leaving 3 or 4 star review.

Race/ethnic/cultural tendencies on 5-star an numeric eating scales have been studied quite a bit, and, yes, Europeans tend to give higher ratings for acceptable service (tending to give maximum ratings for “meets expectations”) while Asians tend to give lower ratings (tending toward middle-of-scale ratings for “meets expectations”).

I wonder how much that tendency is the result of Europeans having more exposure to "management by the numbers" kind of rating/review systems. Nearly everyone has held or known someone close to them with a job where a mostly meaningless customer review/rating/survey grade had an enormously disproportionate impact on their perceived job performance. The only times I'll ever rate something that isn't exceptionally good or exceptionally bad is when it is obviously tied to that person's performance metrics and they met expectations.

I would report that. All of the UberX rides that I had in Delihi were taxis who didn't have the meter on. I've had a few that were just not great, butyou shouldn't be having that big of an issue with Uber there. English is an offical language in India.

This was in Chennai mostly, so little different language situation. I don’t mean to come off too harsh on it, as having Uber in India was extremely useful for me getting around. Some of the rides were around 1-2 USD so wasn’t worth the hassle.

There are 16 official languages in India. The vast majority of cab drivers you encounter will only know one of them. In the South English is more likely to be spoken, in the North, it is far less likely.

I can vouch for there being a protected class bias. In my experience (Boston), using Uber while on crutches will cause your rating to fall. Even if you take full-service Uber’s (not Pool), and generally have someone to help you in and out and managing your crutches, drivers simply tend to rate you lower. Possibly because they have to wait longer, or because I need to lean on the car getting in and out, or because they need to keep the crutches in their car somehow.

I was on crutches with a broken ankle a few years ago and definitely took more Ubers during that period (including shorter rides). This could definitely be part of it.

Can vouch for this, a few years ago I broke my ankle and was on crutches. During that time I got my only non-5-star Uber ratings.

I don't think there's much you can do, or if there is it is none of these things. Mine was ~4.5 for forever. I was always on time, careful entering/exiting the vehicle, very polite, etc. and even regularly gave cash tips before the app offered the option.

A few years ago I started dating a girl who had nearly a 5 star rating. She eventually moved in with me and since then nearly all my trips are together. We are often late arriving to the meeting point, she has no hesitation to ask the driver to change the air temperature, adjust the music station or volume, open or close windows, always takes water when available, and asks to be dropped off at a given point regardless of traffic lights or inconvenient turns for the driver. Since this started, my rating has steadily climbed and is now around 4.8.

Based off your comment, I'll assume that you are a male. Based on this assumption, there is a possbility that gender is at play.

There is also the possibility that asking people to do small things for you will increase their positive view of you. I remember reading about psychologist having uncovered such an effect but I forget the name of it.

If I had to bet, I would say both factors (and others we aren't considered) are at play.

This is known as the Ben Franklin Effect [0] and is pretty interesting to read up on. It wouldn't at all surprise me if this plays into passenger ratings, even though it seems counter-intuitive.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_effect

OK, I think it's another effect than "increasing their positive view of you". It is something I have noted and struggled with because it is counter intuitive to me.

I always try to be very autonomous and ask the minimum favors/services from people, trying not to bother them. This has caused me trouble several times, from people that were supposed to help me. When I was doing track and field two decades ago I had a sports sponsorship cancelled essentially because I didn't ask any extra gear.

When you ask a favor and the person fulfills it, they get to be useful and it gives them purpose. I have found that this varies from people to people.

The Uber driver will most likely feel good if you actually need his help as a human being rather than just be a mindless vehicle operator.

Congratulations on having a pretty girlfriend. Don't underestimate the power of having a pretty girl talk to you, even if it's just to ask to change the radio station.

It goes both ways. I remember a conversation I had with a very nice Uber driver, a Muslim woman. She made a point of picking up female riders with low ratings, because she believed male Uber drivers would downrate them if they thought the women unattractive, or if they rejected advances.

Also an effective strategy to get uncontested rides, I assume.

Of course, occasionally you’re going to get low rated passengers who are just straight up assholes. So there’s some risk.

> I don't think there's much you can do

Have you tried asking? I asked a few drivers, at the end of a ride and after I’d rated them, what I could do better. Two complained about my taking work calls in the car. I started requesting permission, at the beginning of the ride, to take a phone call. (It’s their car, after all.) Never been refused. Rating jumped from ~4.4 to ~4.9.

I’ll also note that some of the sweetest people I know have terrible ratings for constantly being late, at the wrong pick-up spot or other little reasons. It’s mostly a rating around if you’re observant and treat the driver like a human being more than if you’re a good person.

(Note: I’m a guy. I don’t think gender is as powerful as other comments assume.)

>Two complained about my taking work calls in the car. I started requesting permission, at the beginning of the ride, to take a phone call.(It’s their car, after all.)

Seriously? It's their car that you've contracted to take you from Point A to Point B. It would never occur to me to ask permission before making (or taking) a phone call.

I dunno, if I were a driver I'd probably be pretty annoyed by hearing one end of a loud conversation for an entire long ride.

Generally in the rides I'm in the driver is still listening to whatever music they like, which obviously they can't do if the passenger is trying to have a phone conversation.

Welcome to the service industry. This isn’t doing a favor for a friend but driving someone around for cash.

You have the right to loudly talk on the phone, and they have the right to rate you lower. It's a fair system in that way.

I take Uber rarely but, of course, the system is setup so that the driver can rate me however they like for whatever reason. As can I them. And it might even be reasonable for them to give me a lower score for a long "loud" conversation or for discussing matters that probably shouldn't be discussed in public which make them uncomfortable.

OTOH, while they can do whatever they want, the expectation seems to be that both driver and rider give top scores barring one or the other doing something that clearly deviates from the norms of taxi driver or passenger behavior.

In any case, I'm pretty confident that I'm normally polite and if someone gives me a lower score now and then on one of these services, I really don't care.

> It's a fair system in that way.

It's only fair if the expectations were made known before you ordered the ride.

If you have a low rating, Uber offers tips to improve it such as not slamming doors, being ready for pickup, etc. I think it’s also easily found in the Help section of the app.

Based on what I've read here, your passenger rating depends on a lot more than simply "don't be a jerk".

Right, you have to be there at your pickup point, you shouldn't slam the door, you shouldn't be a creep. Not very hard.

Is it also fair if they give you a lower rating because they dont like your voice or hair or how you dress?

> It's their car that you've contracted to take you from Point A to Point B. It would never occur to me to ask permission before making (or taking) a phone call.

It wouldn’t have to me, either. But I was curious and so asked, and in between the useless answers I got that repeating point of feedback.

Note that I didn’t stop taking calls. But I did think “how would I behave if I were in a friend’s car?” I figured I’d at least give a heads up that a call was coming in. So I tried that one thing and it worked.

An Uber driver is not my friend. They’re someone I’m paying to drive me.

Furthermore if I were driving with a friend someplace and they got a call, I’d think nothing of them answering it and having a conversation.

> An Uber driver is not my friend. They’re someone I’m paying to drive me.

This is a fair view. It’s also fair to treat a driver as a new acquaintance. And it makes sense that the drivers who have a choice (i.e. are higher rated) will choose riders who treat them like that.

My point isn’t everyone has to do these things. Just that if you care about your rating, asking for feedback and offering common courtesies cab go a long way. (I’ve also found it improves my disposition, but that’s a separate matter.)

Perfectly fair. It sounds as if you might have liked the early days of Lyft. Personally I never used them then because the whole fist bump, faux friend, thing was totally offputting.

On the rare occasions I use Uber or Lyft today, I’m polite and friendly/chatty enough depending on the circumstances but someone’s doing a job for me and I don’t owe them anything beyond basic politeness.

Dunno. It's a per peeve of mine when people take a non-speakerphone call in a common space. Trains, cars, meals, or living rooms.

It monopolizes the noise in the area and puts everyone else in some sort of awkward space where they have to eavesdrop and pretend they aren't. Sometimes I think about obviously watching a train commuter have a long and loud phone conversation, but I don't because it would be rude and aggressive.

I guess hired cars are a little different in most respects but people can still feel bad or awkward for listening in on something they aren't part of. Especially if the conversation is loud, personal, or confidential.

It's much better if the phone call is urgent, short, or important. But even then it's polite to be conciliatory as the phone call is made or picked up.

Hired car is definitely different. You’ve rented that space, it is not public. I don’t see anything wrong with having a phone call while being driven around.

I don't take calls during rides, I'm almost never late for the pickup (and have never gone past the grace period), and I'm very precise at setting the pickup pin exactly. It's not any of these issues.

And no, I've never considered asking "how I can do better". They're providing the service, not me, and I'm paying them.

>Two complained about my taking work calls in the car. I started requesting permission, at the beginning of the ride, to take a phone call.(It’s their car, after all.)

That's ridiculous. Who is paying who again?

> Who is paying who again?

It’s a two-sided market. Nobody likes being treated like a commodity.

> Two complained about my taking work calls in the car.

That's insane. Do those drivers think that it's part of the deal that you should be entertaining them?

Maybe it works like the Chinese Sesame credit system then. Who knows. You're probably trying too hard.

Same here, my rating is ~4.6 whereas my girlfriend is at close to 5 with exactly the same circumstances as you. Maybe I am not as charming :(

It would be interesting to see how the average rating compares between young women vs men.

Is she polite about it? Could be the Ben Franklin effect.

Customers are expensive to acquire, and Uber is not going to throw them away for no good reason. Their incentive is to ban customers only when their behavior is so bad that they are at risk of losing drivers

They could start banning people they don't like for political reasons, same as payment processors. If people from the other side of the aisle are in power, they could ask Uber to ban illegal aliens.

It's crazy that you won't be able to take public transportation like Uber because of your political beliefs or because of who you are.

> They could start banning people they don't like for political reasons

Start? Uber already blocked police from using their service in certain jurisdictions.

Source?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...

Not so much ideologically motivated, rather trying to evade the enforcement of local laws.

For Uber the drivers are also their customers. So, agree that protecting the drivers from hostile/bad riders is important also. Uber is just like a marketplace in many ways.

I'm sitting at 4.97 in LA - but I ride a lot. And my ratings scale for drivers is similar - 5 star for normal, compliments for things above that, <4 stars for "you did something obviously wrong, WTF" level service.

As for racial / protected class bias in ratings - I'm not sure what Uber would hit that something like Tinder wouldn't, since all the ratings are from other "users".

> since all the ratings are from other "users".

Posting racially-discriminating for-rent ads gets both the landlord and the newspaper in trouble. "We're just a platform" doesn't work as an excuse.

It's also not hard to detect statistically - with enough data you can see that a given driver is giving worse ratings to protected class members compared to similar drivers at the same time and place.

That requires Uber to know the class of its riders.

And the account holder won’t account for all riders (and could be different than the account holder entirely).

Riders can self-select into a protected class, maybe?

This will of course lead to a situation where some hooligans opt into a protected class just to mess with the system. Even still, on large number of rides it will even out.

But everyone is a member of a protected class. Some people might not be members of historically disadvantaged protected classes, but the relevant laws don't discriminate in that way. ('Men' is a protected class. 'Women' is a protected class. And 'Other' is a protected class, too.)

There's no such thing as protected classes in dating though, so I don't think it's a useful parallel. You're allowed to not date, say, people of other races if that's how your tastes run, but you're not allowed to discriminate against providing business services to people by race.

Is showing your profile to other people a "business service"? Because IIRC Tinder does some ML to show you people they predict you'll like (based on what other people with preferences similar to you liked) - and that would probably result in showing certain profiles to others less often.

This is an interesting question that's above my pay grade. I would love to hear an answer from a knowledgeable lawyer.

Mine used to be a 4.78. Not sure what caused it to be like that. I tend to either chat with the driver, or I'll stay silent. I'll never take the water or candy. I feel like I'm owed something to them if I do.

My rating did go up after going to India. (Probably because of the numerous amounts of rides I took there)

I always sit in the front, it never occurred to me that this might be annoying for the driver. Is it?

When I've driven people around, even people I've barely met (say friends-of-friends), I've always preferred that they sit in the front. I was never a pro driver though.

I don't know if it's annoying for the driver but the only time I would even consider thinking of sitting in the front seat would be if I was in a group and we needed to use that seat to fit everyone.

Driving around even casual acquaintances (e.g. friends-of-friends) is a totally different dynamic where it would seem a bit odd for them to sit in the back seat as if you were their chauffeur even if you sort of are.

I prefer to sit on the front seat because it always has a working 3-point seatbelt. On the back, seatbelts are often the older 2-point seatbelts, tucked between the backrest and the seat so you can't reach it, or both.

How's your rating?

That's how you answer that question I guess... :)

Good thinking. It's 4.92, so I guess it doesn't hurt.

I'm in Brazil, no idea what my city average is.

I have a 4.20 and it's bizarre. I've never made an Uber wait for me, I'm always outside. I greet them. I'm clean. My routes are always penciled in exactly. I don't see how I'm not the model passenger.

Maybe it's just because I'm a gringo in Mexico? Maybe I should use a little more small talk charm? Or offer them gum? Improve my accent? Bring them a bottle of S.Pellegrino, nicely chilled? It's a stupid system.

Edit: A sibling comment inspired me to ask my girlfriend for her rating. It's a 4.89. Yet she always stays inside until the Uber driver arrives to pick her up, often honking outside for her while she finally starts turning off lights and shutting the house down.

May we assume your girlfriend is a more attractive individual to the average driver then you are?

So the rating system is basically hot-or-not. Kind of pointless

Based on what you and some other people are saying, it does seem bizarre, like maybe some kind of random favoritism is going on.

I also am white and live in Mexico (Playas de Tijuana). My rating is 4.81. I have been going on the assumption that I am kind of ugly looking, although its hard for me to be objective about it.

I do always give tips though. They usually have three choices, like 10, 15, or 20 pesos, and I always pick the highest option. Sometimes for a longer trip I will put like 38 pesos tip. Maybe there is some way for drivers to track tips and somehow that can affect a rating?

I always say thanks for the ride when I get in and out.

My Spanish is very limited and I rarely attempt to say anything in Spanish except for buena noche or something like that. In this area around 33-40% of the drivers speak English.

4.5 is not bad. Stop panicking. Some people have 2.0

> It's hard to know what I could be doing to get a better rating beyond just bribing drivers with cash tips at the end of the ride.

This is almost all that matters now. Any drivers forum will be full of drivers basically talking about how they give lower ratings if you don't tip cash. A few are even full-on blatant about it in person if you bring it up.

After time I think we'll see things coalesce around only riders who pay cash tips get 5 star ratings.

The rider can also leave a bad rating for the driver in this case, though, right?

Does Uber deactivate drivers that fall below a certain rating? Even if they don't, I presume lower ratings would hurt a driver more than they would a passenger.

So if a driver is trying to pull this it wouldn't end out great for either party, I would presume?

Ratings by drivers are very often based on irrelevant criteria like how likeable you seem, or whether they interpret your preference for silence as an insult.

This is me as a rider:

a) Always at pickup on time (or I message "be right there" if I'm a minute away)

b) I enter and say "Hi, how's it going?" and acknowledge.

c) I then put in my headphones for audible. I say nothing else the rest of the trip.

d) I get out where it's most convenient for them, and I say "Thank you", and gently shut the door.

Yep, apparently they don't care - my rating hangs out in low 4.7s.

However, Uber Black always boosts my ratings, because the drivers are more mature and rate based on what actually matters.

This is what happens when you don't have psychologists or similar quantitative people who handle human data on your team.

I've studied psychology and CS and the difference in how they treat ratings is stark, CS GoT nothing on us! (yes, I did that, I'll get myself of stage now)

A psychologist is paranoid when it comes to quantifying human data. How paranoid you ask? I'll try to capture the sentiment, but I'm sure it's way worse than the following paragraph.

Psychologist: Should I go for a simple yes/no? Well that could useful, but it could also be that I leave too much data on the table. Let me look at tons of research on this topic (hello Google Scholar! Long time no see). Well, if I do 3 stars, then the middle option also becomes a neutral option, which means I'm skewing the data, so I might have to go to 4 possible choices then. Then again, people are more used to the 5 star rating, so that has a plus for usability, but then you'd have the same issue as a 3 choice rating. Maybe I should just use a 7-likert scale type of thing? And obviously, it's also the case that this is an ordinal scale. The property of 1 < 2 < 3 and so on still holds, but the property of 1 + 1 = 2 doesn't. Do people really mean with "2" twice as big compared to a "1"? Are they able to quantify such relationships on any scale? Perhaps quantitatively minded people on a 3 choice scale, but we'd need to do studies about that, but the average user probably not -- still need to do studies about that (and hello Google Scholar, here we meet again in the same paragraph).

CS or UX person with no research background: ah yea, let's do a 5 star rating, that seems cool :)

It's on you Uber.

It's really on you.

Hire psychologists / socially minded statisticians.

Uber's research teams already employ psychologists and statisticians. They also employ various other types of cross-disciplinary researchers.

If they had a say on the 5 star rating, then fair enough. In that case, my comment is simply a fun distinction between how two different perspectives look at data from people.

If not, it's still on Uber. But like other comments said, there are other considerations that Uber needs to take into account (business, brand, etc.).

Well, your comment is also a pretty disparaging and reductive idea of what UX is actually like. I'm sorry you've met people in UX by title only, because what you described is nothing like the actual field. If someone claiming to be in UX isn't doing research and testing, it's not UX.

Fair point, that’s is what I have seen so far.

I'm a fan of HappyOrNot for dead-simple intuitive feedback: https://www.happy-or-not.com/en/smiley-terminal/

Until schoolkids repeatedly mash the frowny face button for lulz.

We need version numbers for game-theoretic universes, e.g. the effects of companies which launch into a market whose assumptions and practices will soon be overturned by said company.

The second-order feedback loops are adversarial (kids, competitors, city-states, policy) and subject to data analysis, but the public is more likely to receive marketing narratives than peer-reviewed scholarship.

I always press the frowny button in grocery shops, not necesarily because there were long lines or because the shelves weren't stocked adequatly, but if I press the frowny button I assume the place will get even better.

I disagree with those buttons because you can't really find the cause of a problem in a giant macihnery with just a single output. So the feedback is probably close to useless.

The buttons are generally used to punish the clerks on duty. All you are doing is griefing minimum-wage employees.

Companies don’t care about this. They just need some arbitrary scale (5 stars, 10 point rating) and anything less than perfect is an excuse to put someone on notice. Always handy to point to when needing an excuse to trim numbers or not increase benefits. And since nobody is perfect, you can find some arbitrary cutoff that lots of people will be below (“sorry you’re averaging 4.4 stars, we can’t give EVERYONE bonuses now can we”) there’s always room for excuses.

Yeah, so... trying to keep the snark under control long enough to ask a genuine question.

Can you give a quick exposition for why the giant paragraph is actually, y'know, better than "that seems cool"? I mean, I buy that psychologists will spend lots of time thinking about a fundamentally intractable problem in their field, in the same way that the programmers are going to obsess over irrelevant design issues (and they do!).

But it's bad when psychologists do it for the same reason it's bad when programmers do it. Just pick something and move on, unless you've got a clear and persuasive argument to the contrary.

I really like your comment. As a scientist I'd say that a pragmatic solution (widely used in experimental sciences) is to calibrate your measures.

Want to use a yes/no? Fine (maybe 7 stars give better feedback, maybe not). But what should be the business decision based on the answer? How valuable is a yes? How costly a no?

"Due process" is a legal standard that is present in US Constitutional amendments for a reason.

Now obviously Uber is a private company and is currently legally allowed to discriminate against customers with low ratings provided they are not discriminating along protected categories like race or gender.

BUT, ride-sharing apps tend to turn into natural monopolies or duopolies simply because of natural network effects, and effectively become part of a city's transportation system. I would argue that, with this, they should carry additional responsibilities to customers that a normal private company doesn't.

And one of them is that banning customers should involve "due process", e.g. standards for investigation, burden of proof, opportunity to contest, and resulting actions, e.g. a temporary suspension. A permanent ban should be reserved for only the most serious cases, e.g. where a customer has been convicted in a court of law for threatening violence and gone to prison. (And a temporary ban can be put in place while a court case in pending.)

A crowdsourced star rating is not due process. And with Uber and Lyft essentially part of public transport, this is a scary and deeply undemocratic path to go down.

In NYC it's illegal for a taxi not to pick someone up, because this can be the source of tremendous racial discrimination (and continues to be, despite its illegality). We don't want to let Uber do the same type of thing to another class of people.

I agree with you on this. I find it difficult to imagine a scenario where this could reasonably be enforced, but I agree with the sentiment.

I would also extend it to social media. Like Uber and Lyft have more or less become forms of public transport, Twitter, Facebook, etc have become the new "public square". Private companies being able to ban someone from the public square without due process seems to be a scary precedent as well.

>A crowdsourced star rating is not due process. And with Uber and Lyft essentially part of public transport, this is a scary and deeply undemocratic path to go down.

Actually, crowdsourcing is quite democratic. That's the problem. Due process protects against the ultimate form of democracy—a lynching.

Given that Uber already uses a pretty similar version of this system for drivers (it's based on star ratings as well), and riders are just as potentially biased as drivers, unless you have a problem with using ratings for eligibility on both the supply and demand side, this isn't a strong argument.

The comparison with the taxi law is apples and oranges: a single taxi driver can make the unilateral decision to discriminate, while in Uber's system, it would require systemic discrimination across all of the drivers in a given city. While I'll grant that it's possible, if it reaches that point, there should be grounds for a lawsuit alleging disparate impact (which I believe is an established concept when applied to private businesses that was incorporated in the Warren Court years, although there's more gray area here, so I may be off the mark).

If Uber were considered an actual employer, and the US had stronger protections for employment (instead of at-will) then that would make sense -- there's a good argument it should be illegal to fire you merely because customers rate you badly because they don't like your hairstyle or where you come from.

But I'm particularly basing my original argument on the fact that dispatch car services easily become a natural monopoly or duopoly, so customers don't have choice and they need to get around the city.

Whereas driving is a relatively low-skill and low-paying job, of which there are many many others in our service economy -- tons and tons of service jobs. My point is that if you lose your job driving for Uber, you can find another decent-enough substitute job because there are literally thousands of companies hiring. If you get banned from riding Uber, there may be no good substitute because there are only a handful of public transportation options at most, and at a given time/place Uber might be the only one.

> Now obviously Uber is a private company

No, they are not. Uber went public this month.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519...

"Private" in the sense of "not government-owned".

As opposed to public agencies such as the Post Office, or a quasi-public corporation such as Amtrak.

> In NYC it's illegal for a taxi not to pick someone up, because this can be the source of tremendous racial discrimination (and continues to be, despite its illegality). We don't want to let Uber do the same type of thing to another class of people.

Why do you believe this isn't in play already?

I strongly suspect that passenger ratings strongly correlate to race. We already have LOTS of evidence in this thread that good ratings correlate to being female.

> For drivers, they face a risk of deactivation if they fall below 4.6

This is absurd. Even though I feel like some drivers deserve 3 or 4 stars I always give 5 because I had no idea what Uber does with these ratings. This confirms that I was doing the right thing. Just because I give 3 or 4 stars doesn't mean that I wouldn't want to ride with them again. They just aren't the best of the best.

If people more regularly gave 3 or 4 star reviews Uber would lower their threshold. Replacing drivers is a real cost, which they try and minimize.

But in the short term your drivers will bear the brunt of it.

The problem is that there will always be people that always give 5 stars, so drivers would be punished for picking up people that leave other ratings. Sure it might bring the average down to 4.2 for example. Maybe they should adjust the rating based on the average rating left by the rider.

I feel it's not my business to understand Uber's intent with the ratings. They ask me for my honest rating, on a scale that goes from 1-5. Why should we assume that 1-4 are essentially saying "fire this person", and only one value means keep them. I find it particularly absurd. I routinely rate 2, 3, 4, etc. based on my own gauge. What Uber wants to do with that data is their prerogative.

Well congratulations for sticking it to the low paid drivers in the name of defending your ego.

I agree that the rating system is stupid, but also that there's a position of power that comes with being a rider. Assuming you had a safe, pleasant journey, it should be a 5 star journey. If the driver was objectively rude, the car dirty, or you felt unsafe, then obviously that's a good case to rate someone lower.

Right, but most people would still look at the effect of their actions on other people, even if indirectly.

Same reason I always rate customer service reps a 5 (unless something really appalling happened). Most companies would prefer you not provide feedback at all than provide a lower 5 rating on a 1-5 scale.

Sure, you don't have any responsibility to understand what is going to happen with the ratings, but once you do, it seems overly punitive to give low ratings.

I think this is basically a argument that star ratings are worthless, rather than that using all 5 stars makes more sense. Obviously, many Uber drivers do keep >4.6 ratings for extended periods. And since most people presumably don't know about the 4.6 rule, it's not a collective concession to Uber's standards; people are just genuinely rating drivers 5 stars much of the time.

I recommend (to everyone interested) asking a few friends how they use star ratings, on Uber or anywhere else. My experience is that people say all of "I give three stars for average", "I give four stars for average because we're used to grade inflation", and "I give 5 stars unless there was a reason to subtract from it".

Given that, star ratings without explicit guidance on meaning are sort of a disaster. I'm not so much annoyed by which number Uber ties people's livelihoods to as by the whole decision to use a bad system when so many better ones are available.

Yeah, I would assume that 3/5 is the basic minimum, not 4.6..

Either Uber should review their baseline, and make it explicit that giving 4 or below will have severe consequences on the driver.

I would reserve the high standards for some other setting (tech workers perhaps). Driving uber is worse than retail - nearly 100% of work is customer facing, the environment is cutthroat and many drivers can't catch a break (financial pressure, hard times that sort of thing).

And uber has huge surplus of drivers - they are going to cull hard, and driver volume will still be high in their major profit centers.

I don't rate drivers. It's an unnecessarily self centred approach to what should be a uniformly acceptable service. I don't see why if I'm having a shitty day and a driver ticks me off that I should really have any impact over their ability to work.

I had drivers who were clueless about using a navigator, couldn't find my location on the map, drove crazily or made comments about random women walking in the street.

Still no rating?

Probably just tell him to sort himself out.

>drove crazily

>made comments about random women

Those are cases where you should also leave a note about the driver in the app, in addition to your rating (or non-rating).

> I had drivers who were clueless about using a navigator

I absolutely despise when drivers ask me the directions when their GPS is telling them right in their face.

That being said I've only ever rated a driver low once, and that was because that person probably should have never had a license to begin with.

I take the same approach. I don’t rate people.

One time I contacted uber when my driver got out of the car and punched a pedestrian. I still didn’t rate the driver. I just reported the incident. I also ended my ride when that happened. Hopefully he was arrested, but I didn’t stick around to find out.

I don't see how they can expect most rides to be a 5* experience. Most hotels aren't 5* hotels. Most films aren't 5* films. What do they think drivers should be doing in order to deliver such an extraordinary experience every time?

People say if it's a normal ride you should give 5* (and I do because I don't want to cause the driver problems if it's been fine), but you don't award a functional hotel room 5*, or award a restaurant 3 Michelin stars because their food was ok.

There should be just a better explanation.

Same as with your mobile phone signal. 5 bars means anywhere from 50% to 100% good signal.

4 stars means 40%. One star 10%.

I think a one star rating is closer to "fire this person immediately" due to grave concerns.

The reason the average is high is because so many people give five stars for everything. To drop below 4.6, they're probably getting one and two star reviews for some rides.

It doesn't matter? Regardless of how people distribute their scores, as long as there is some overall correlation to quality, then there would be a cutoff at some point (as long as Uber decides to remove drivers below a certain cutoff). It just so happens that based on the aggregate data that they see, it is 4.6. It could be any arbitrary number, and anyone's personal anecdote on how they rate drivers doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

It absolutely does matter, because it leads to "grade inflation" - people change their rating because, like the parent comment, they know that anything besides a 5 is voting to get the driver fired. Indeed, I'm only willing to give someone below a 5-star rating if I think I got really horrible service.

But all that does is move up the threshold. Feels like you and the parent comment are assuming the threshold stays fixed. That is most likely not the case. Uber is setting the stars threshold at some arbitrary number to achieve some quality goal based on their internal data. Its not like Uber can't see the distribution of stars. Based on how people vote, they pick a cutoff in order to achieve their quality goals. If people change the way they are rating drivers, that cutoff will change as well.

A star rating is a bad way to measure - as a driver you wouldn't make the 4.6 grade mentioned if you got equal amounts of 4 and 5 ratings

Better to to ask 'would you ride/drive with this person again?' with a simple yes/no answer, and if no then ask for a reason - if people aren't given a reason why they got a lower rating then how are they expected to change their behavior?

The only time I wanted to give a bad review I couldn't - the driver left me waiting in the cold for 30 mins and then 'cancelled' without ever picking me up

Ratings are way too arbitrary. I only give perfect scores in very rare situations. 5 stars to me means I can literally not think of anything that could be improved. I can always come up with a way something isn't perfect.

Do you want to revise your judging criteria, now that you have this new information that your giving drivers a non-5 score contributes to them losing one of their means of earning an income?

(not a rhetorical hit at you, just curious to know your thoughts)

I pretty much only give 5 stars even though I don't feel like that's what I should be giving. I was just stating if I was honest with my rating it would only hurt drivers. That's what I've always assumed and it turns out I was right.

I totally agree. 4.6 as a cutoff is insane.

I regularly rate things 3 if it's good, 4 if great (on Google Maps).

What Uber should have is:

Rate your ride:

5 - great

4 - bad

3 - really bad

2 - awful

1 - shouldn't be allowed to drive ever again

What I think they should do is just have one questions with two answers: “Would you ride with this driver again? Yes or no?”

All 5 star scales operate as follows:

5 - Good

4 - Terrible

3 - Terrible

2 - Terrible

1 - Terrible

That seems to have become the norm. To me that's just people misunderstanding how to use a gradual scale.

I recently got a phone call from my apartment management after I left a bunch of 3s and 4s on their annual review, they seemed distraught they got such bad scores. From my point of view they were doing just fine. The fact that they're not excellent in every regard shouldn't be surprising when I'm not paying through my nose to live there, I'm perfectly happy with 3.5/5 since that's what I'm paying for.

It's an ordinal scale with arbitrary meaning. 4 doesn't mean its twice as good as a 2 star rating (there is no interval or ratio). It basically means 5 = all okay! 4 and below there were issues of varying subjective degrees.

See also: https://xkcd.com/1098/

Ratings tend to be skewed in various ways everywhere. But it's particularly extreme when people know the norm is to give a perfect score for any transaction that didn't have serious flaws--especially when you know lower scores have material negative real-world implications for individuals trying to earn a living.

That basically is what they have (see bottom):

https://www.uber.com/en-AU/blog/how-ratings-work/

I think it's absurd that they try to dictate user behavior based on broad averages, as opposed to normalizing each individual's ratings to fit a standard distribution, then averaging those normalized ratings.

Put another way, star ratings are bad because different ratings mean different things to different people. To some people, like me, 5 stars means absolutely perfect/phenomenal/couldn't be better, while to others it means "it met my expectations", which I would consider 3 stars.

Amazon's star ratings are also pretty meaningless, for the same reason. And I used to bemoan YouTube's switch to a vote system from stars, then realised it was for the better.

Perhaps a better solution would be a three level system, with labelled letter grades: A (exceeded my expectations = perfect), B (met my expectations = good), and C (did not meet expectations = bad). Most people are also familiar with letter grades from school (at least N.Americans are), so people know exactly what each rating means. And the average rating could be displayed like "B+" or "A-", or "A+" for almost across the board perfect.

I don't think "exceeded my expectations" is even a useful rating since it creates the 4.6 situation all over again.

Not sure I even want an Uber experience that exceeds my expectations. I want one that is reliable and exactly what I expect.

A driver should be able to get a 100% rating providing the exact service that people imagine when they order an Uber: reliable, gets you from A to B, clean car, no problems.

With the "exceeded expectations" rating like the current system, some drivers bend over backwards in weird ways like by offering Snickers bars, mounting a TV on the back of their seat with a movie playing, and all sorts of random stuff that I just find jarring. Nobody should feel like they have to do that.

Well, maybe not for Uber, but I think it would work for Amazon.

The only star rating system I ever liked was Netflix, in the disc era. It worked in part because the stars had responses connected to them (“Loved,” “really liked,” “liked,” “disliked,” and “hated”) and in part because it was entirely calibrated to the user’s taste. It didn’t really matter what criteria anyone else used to rate a movie three stars versus five stars as long as you were consistent in your own ratings.

I think there's a reason Uber chose cutoffs around 4.6 (depending on the city) and I don't think it's because they consider someone with a 4.5 to be a terrible driver.

Uber faces a similar issue to taxis: the supply of potential drivers is too high. Too many drivers means each driver can't get enough fares. Cities solved this for taxis with the medallion system.

Uber could limit drivers arbitrarily by preventing new sign ups, but if their competitors don't do the same, this puts them at a disadvantage without solving the problem: the drivers they prevent from signing up will just go to Lyft. Using a star rating as a cutoff is smarter. The drivers with the highest star ratings are the ones the riders generally liked best. If Uber's competitors want to take the lower rated drivers that Uber rejected, that's fine with Uber. Riders will start to find, on average, that Uber has higher quality drivers, giving Uber an edge over competitors.

The 4.6 minimum rating may have been tuned so that there's enough drivers that riders aren't kept waiting, but not so many that each driver can't get enough fares.

I am totally paranoid about my Uber Passenger rating - I've been stuck at 4.88 for the last year - so I don't know if they are updating it. I'll go out of my way to wait outside in the rain so my Uber Driver doesn't have to wait, always try and at least meet up with their level of chattiness, if not necessarily encourage it. Obv be super polite, cheerful, and never, ever make the mistake of asking an UberExpress driver to drop you off anywhere than the designated point.

Still - stuck at 4.88, wondering what I can do better...

I can't tell if this is satire or just very sad.

It sounds like satire, reminds me of the Black Mirror episode.

I thought so, but then I read all the other comments. I'm not so sure. I don't think it's all satire.

If it's so hard to tell, doesn't that make it bona-fide dystopian?

In a certain sense it doesn't matter if the original post is satire - enough people unironically agree for it to be real.

This is a forum for hackers, who are likely to obsess over systems like this. I don’t think it’s indicative of a society-wide focus on Uber passenger ratings.

What I've always found interesting about Uber is that if you have one bad night in San Francisco, it could adversely affect your ability to get a ride in Bahrain several years later.

Sure big companies create efficiencies, but they also create Orwellian situations like one above.

I doubt one bad night will affect your ability to get a ride, assuming you have a decent amount of other trips “proving” you won’t be a problem, driver or passenger wise.

If you're already at say a 4.2, a 0 could really bring you down if you don't ride a lot.

Also, IIRC drivers can and do reject rides for people at their predetermined threshold. E.g. they will pass on a 4.0 waiting for a 4.5 or above (or whatever the thresholds may be).

aka, always tip.

But how much? Do I need to tip more if I go unmatched on a pool? Should I have known I wouldn’t be matched at 4AM? If I get continuous matches/delays, can I tip less? Was the driver just pretending to be interested in my life story, so I should tip more because of that? Ahhhh, I liked it the way it was before...

20-25% is customary for service providers, especially if you're the only client being served at one time. Never tip less than $3.

Ludicrous. 15% is customary for restaurant waiters, other than that there is no need to tip. Can give barber a few dollars, doorman a certain amount at Christmas. I prefer a society without tips, and would like to know what something costs up front and know the vendor is providing their service to the best of their ability.

I almost took you seriously. Well played. :)

> wondering what I can do better...

Use a service that doesn't micromanage its customers. Lyft, taxis, city transportation services. Or just (shocker) get your own vehicle. If you're travelling, rental cars are also an option.

>Use a service that doesn't micromanage its customers

Lyft is still doing the same sort of micromanagement (you just have to jump through more hoops to see your rider rating, just like it used to be for Uber), and arguably has even more holes for drivers to abuse the rating system against riders (AFAIK, Lyft drivers can manage to correlate tips against specific rides, and have a 24 post-ride window to go back and change ratings for riders).

>taxis, city transportation services. Or just (shocker) get your own vehicle. If you're travelling, rental cars are also an option.

These aren't necessarily realistic alternatives in all cases.

In many second or third tier metro areas in the US, Lyft and Uber have completely destroyed the local taxi industry, to the point where taxis simply aren't a resource that can be utilized without booking far in advance, and even then their success rate for pickups is questionable.

As for public transport - not a realistic option for general use outside the largest metro areas in the US, and even many of the largest (e.g. Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, Dallas) have systems that are nearly useless for those traveling outside of very small portions of the metro area, or aren't commuting into central business districts from suburban transit centers.

'Getting your own vehicle' isn't necessarily economically viable in all cases, or even a usable option for those that face challenges related to driving ability.

And rental cars? Aside from making zero sense for certain urban destinations, employers increasingly require business travelers to utilize rideshare services while traveling for work.

> In many second or third tier metro areas in the US, Lyft and Uber have completely destroyed the local taxi industry, to the point where taxis simply aren't a resource that can be utilized without booking far in advance, and even then their success rate for pickups is questionable.

Anecdotally, In Midtown Atlanta, in 2008; It took a call and 30 minutes to get a taxi to come pick up < a mile away from major hotels. And on the ride back on a 3 mile trip, magically the taxi's credit card machine was broken.

I've personally encountered the same kind of thing in Chicago and Houston outside of the major business districts.

I've recently been living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I don't think I can recall even seeing a taxi in the area anywhere other than the taxi stand at the Detroit airport over the past 6 months.

If you're travelling, rental cars are also an option.

If you are 21 or older. There are a lot of people in the 18-21 range. And, in the 21-4 range there are often fees associated with that age, which can be significant.[1]

[1] https://www.enterprise.com/en/help/faqs/car-rental-under-25....

Personally, I don't possess a drivers license - while the DMV would happily grant one my lack of peripheral vision in the left and poor depth perception make me extremely uncomfortable on the road. I rely on public transportation and services like Uber/Lyft/local cabs to get around when I travel as a result.

I'm not particularly fond of traditional taxi services due to a lack of fare transparency and ease of use I expect from "ridesharing" (can we replace this term someday) services, so my rider rating is fairly important to me.

i too don't have one. not because i have any physical problems, it's just that i don't have use for one. i don't have a car and i don't plan on having one -- so why bother?

also, by not having a car (and using public transportation/uber/cabs) i like to think i'm helping the my city a tiny bit by not having yet another car on the street when it's not needed.

> In many second or third tier metro areas in the US, Lyft and Uber have completely destroyed the local taxi industry

In my city, taxis have responded to the presence of Uber and Lyft by matching what they do, and taxi companies are thriving.

Aside from the stupid "rating" system and the price of the trip, there is nothing Uber or Lyft offers that isn't matched by real taxi services here.

>In my city, taxis have responded to the presence of Uber and Lyft by matching what they do, and taxi companies are thriving.

Are you in the US? I've seen this happening with somewhat questionable success in Europe, but nowhere else.

Yes, I'm in a medium-sized city in the US. Uber and Lyft operate here, but they don't seem to be as popular as taxi companies (at least, I see far fewer of them than taxis).

I know that two of the largest taxi companies in town have just increased the number of drivers they have.

lyft has ratings, too

I really hope this is an allusion to that Portlandia Episode

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6459136/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9C4DhTnuQQ

You can get a sex change (if you're a man)!

Satire or black mirror?

I have no idea what my Uber rating is, who do you even know?

If you open the Uber app and click the hamburgler at the top left, it will show your rating underneath your name.

People are commenting asking/suggesting this is satire and I know it's not because I am the same way.

Not satire, I’m also at exactly 4.88 and worried about it... I use uber as my main form of transportation!

I 'm also at 4.88! And has been there for 4 years, never went up or down (at least I haven't noticed it. I don't exactly sweat over it. Only checked when someone asks which is like once per year).

I can imagine 2 things. 1. Actual rating is way lower and uber is hiding it from us. 2. Their system is buggy.

Isn't it as simple as the more rides you take, the harder it is to alter your average?

And it never moved by a factor of even 0.01? Since they are probably doing some rounding, it never moved by 0.005? Maybe it did and by the time I checked it was back at 4.88.

It's interesting that many people in this thread report 4.88 though. I would assume Uber wants to obfuscate recent ratings (eg if you notice when your rating changed, you might pin point the driver and add a case against them if you 're vengeful enough). Maybe it's similar to the number 300 for youtube (where views stop being counted in realtime and they are being grouped + analyzed). Who knows.

Yes you better watch out! Step in dog poop right before entering an Uber and not noticing could get you a negative rating. I hope you don’t have any medical issues which may cause you to have an odor that may cause a negative rating. Or someone hacks your account and you get blacklisted from the ride service. This seems all to balck mirror

I'm the same way though I have a 5.0 -- but it's because I don't want to lose it! However, I feel as if I'd care less once my score is no longer "perfect"... It's a similar game to me as working on/keeping credit scores at an ideal number.

Whenever I see someone who brags about their 5.0 star rating this comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/1098/

Don’t worry about your 5.0, a 4.9 is honestly more impressive. Ask you next driver to give you a 1* to help you with that.

I feel the same way, for the last year mine was 4.86 and just recently it’s dropped to 4.81.

It’s definitely something that worries me as it’s out of my control.

I personally find the idea that a driver has a 'star rating' kind of absurd. It feels like the most pernickety thing.

If my taxi goes to where I want to go, doesn't take a silly detour for money, and doesn't physically assault me, I'm good.

Outside of that, who cares, really? Where and who are these princesses that really care if their cab driver is a 4.2 or 4.6?

I tend to rate basically everyone in service interactions 5 stars because the fact they even turn up to their minimum wage job is a colossal privilege for me to enjoy.

Like, would you rate your bus driver if you could? Your checkout operator? Why? What possible benefit do you derive from that to outweigh the embarassment (to _both_ parties)?

You don't get to pick your driver, so the driver ratings really don't matter to any particular user for a given ride.

IMO the driver ratings make sense, and give the driver incentive to not take purposefully long routes, to not ignore your requests to adjust the A/C, to not talk on their phone, etc.

I have been in countless cab riders where it is clear the driver does not care at all what you think about the ride or the overall experience, and they know you can't really do anything about it (other than maybe not tip them).

I agree with your point "I tend to rate basically everyone in service interactions 5 stars because the fact they even turn up to their minimum wage job is a colossal privilege for me to enjoy."

But one thing I like about rating things is that it gives you a way to flag things that go badly. That's what sucked so much about taxis - you'd be ripped off, forced to pay cash, order a car only to wait (and then it not arrive), or wait out for 30 minutes to flag one down. Drivers would be rude, they'd talk on their phones, they'd drive dangerously. And you'd have to grin and bear it (I've experienced all of the above).

Sure.

The correct way to deal with this is to have a 'report issue' button.

A drive is either acceptable or it's not. The whole gradient thing of rating a driver that didn't smile much 4 out of 5 is just absurd.

It's hard for me to imagine what a "four star Uber ride" looks like. I can think of non-catastrophic issues; maybe the driver has their car details in wrong and is hard to find, or urges you to get out somewhere not that close to the destination because it's a more convenient way to pick up another ride. But a 4-star rating does nothing to solve that, it just adds a bit to the risk of being fired somewhere down the line.

Given that, it just feels like a crummy affectation around a "report issue" button. If a driver was actually doing something dangerous, when would I ever want to handle that with one star instead of some actual context like "crossed three lanes with no signal then ran a red light"?

There are drivers who flat out can't drive. Sure, they got me to the destination without crashing, but I've had ones who were sawing away at the wheel like they where trying to start a fire and used the accelerator and brakes as if they were boolean controls.

That's not a 5. I find Uber and Lyft drivers to be providing a great service at a fair price and most of them earn a 5 rating and a tip.

Exactly. I feel the same way about waiters.

I've had Uber drivers who had cars that were in such poor repair that the ride was physically uncomfortable. Like they had no shocks in the car. To me, it was a minor inconvenience because I was hung over. Someone with a more serious medical problem might have had an even worse time.

I've also had drivers who had absolutely no idea where they were going. To the point where they couldn't even follow the GPS reliably and I had to constantly tell them to get in a different lane or we were going to miss an exit and add significant time on to the trip. This was on the way to the airport, so it was kind of important to get there without a lot of detours. It turned out they didn't even live in my city and had not driven around here at all before.

I do think the 1-5 stars is stupid because people interpret that differently. If it's essentially 5 stars = ok, < 5 stars = "fire this driver", then they should just make it a thumbs up /thumbs down rating.

Oh lovely.

I have a passenger rating of 3.9. I thought that was not too bad until I saw what everyone else here has. I'm autistic, and am not very good at small talk, so I just get in the car, keep quiet, and get out at the end (same as I've always done with taxis).

Does this mean that I'm going to be banned soon for not being popular enough?

Come on. Not being talkative does not give you a bad rating. I've never heard of such a low rating tbh.

Some drivers ABSOLUTELY do downrate passengers for "not being friendly" (aka not wanting to blab the whole ride).

Which is kind of bullshit.

The driver is the one providing the service. And in a service industry, you serve the customer what they want. Not the other way around. If the customer doesn't want to talk, that's their prerogative.

I agree with the idea that there should be a set of rules/guidelines as to what’s expected of a passenger, however I disagree with the “customer is always right” thing as it allows customers to be dicks (and trust me, a lot of people abuse it) without the service provider being able to do anything about it. At least with the rating system the playing field is levelled and both sides have the opportunity to fight.

so you can be a dick to the driver?

Sure but it's averaged out quickly as you take more rides. A 3.9 is not because the person isn't chatty or popular.

I'm generally shy and quiet, especially in a stranger's car, and I can attest that it almost certainly does have a noticeable negative effect on one's passenger rating. However, 3.9 is lower than I'd expect merely on account of being quiet.

>I just get in the car, keep quiet, and get out at the end (same as I've always done with taxis).

I am very much a talker and I was all about being chatty with drivers back when Uber was still a new thing. Several years later and I wish this artifact of a bygone era in ride sharing would go away. It didn't bother me when 100% of my usage of Uber centered around a responsible, sober ride to and from social events where myself and everyone in my party were in a social mood. Now that my usage of Uber is closer to a 50/50 split between a sober driver and "I just need a taxi to get me to work after dropping my car off for an oil change", I hate that one's willingness to socialize is considered a key metric for one's user rating.

Taxi ettitquette wasn't the most friendly thing in the world but it worked for a service that was most frequently used by people already in a bad mood due to some outside inconvenience.

Side note, I just checked and somehow I have a 4.95... I am definitely not that friendly.

It can't be the quantity of conversation that matters. Drivers probably enjoy a quiet ride as much as passengers do.

More likely it's whether you kept them waiting, treated their car nice, how long the trip was, and how polite you were. These are things that will make a driver want you back as a customer.

It almost certainly depends. I don't use Uber or Lyft much but I use a private car service to get back and forth from the airport on a pretty regular basis. While earning some extra money is doubtless part of it, a lot of drivers are retirees and one gets the impression that part of the reason they drive is to get out of the house and talk with people.

They're always very polite. If I want to snooze or read or whatever, they quickly take the hint. But I certainly get drivers who clearly would like to chat, which I'm perfectly happy to do if I'm not groggy or have anything I need to work on.

I never converse. If a driver tries to converse with me I'm polite but I just try to wind-down the conversation by not engaging much.

I'm not being rude, but, almost always busy with something else, either on my laptop working or on a conference call (and yes I've had drivers who try to talk over conference calls or raise up their music).

I have a 4.75 rating so I don't think that's your issue. Do you use Uber much or could a single 1-star review cause a serious drop.

I'm not in an Uber served area anymore, so it's been awhile.

Just ask them how their day is going and whether business is good today. If you’re struggling it’s actually a nice way to practice your social skills in a safe environment (what’s the worst that could happen?).

Going to be blunt here, that's an awful rating. How many rides have you taken? Maybe it's a low sample size? If it's hundreds, then it's very likely you're doing something that's bothering many drivers. For example, maybe you have a hygiene issue. Ask some drivers about your rating... you aren't getting a 3.9 merely for not being chatty or "popular". You are actively upsetting many of the people driving you. Plenty of people don't chat and get ratings 4.85+.

I'm surprised you get picked up with such a low rating, to be honest.

This is a repeating pattern we need to address on a meta-level to avoid an outcome that I think none of us think is optimal.

- private company innovates a service that people use all the time - private company is so successful it displaces other, existing, methods of doing the same - private company becomes defacto monopoly in many cases - private company withdraws service from problem users - those users are left with no options

In the case of Uber, it is kind of obvious, as there are areas where they have displaced (put out if business) numerous private cab and car service companies.

Each step is a reasonable progression through our system. I don’t think anyone should be blamed for each step.

But the final result is beyond Orwellian.

Well, except that there is still competition. They could try again with Lyft, and cabs are still around.

Yea, there are more transport options than ever before.

[edit] warning: you might find this comment irrelevant, annoying or even false

You forgot the juiciest parts:

- private company plays on legal gray areas on purpose

- private company invest aggressively to expand faster than law can react in order to grab said monopoly

This is basically capital cancer, they had a real value but dismissed everything a company is to a society:

- stable for employees

- stable for users

- stable for society

Any company can play rough when let loose with massive funds, but when reality occurs, just like anybody else, they'll have to round their corners and .. surprise.. they stop being interested and competitive.

This is a bad comment. The OP had a valuable point that applies to companies inside and outside of this "gray area[]". You're just making a tired and repetitive dig at Uber itself. It may be that Uber's gig economy model has important downsides of its own, but the salient problem is of private control of what's become public infrastructure, and that has nothing to do with Uber being cancer or something.

Did Uber not do exactly what op said? Aggressively grow to capture markets before the legal system could react? How is that a bad comment? I mean, the original article is about Uber. How is op in the wrong by describing exactly the business model they adopted?

The OP isn't wrong: the problem is that his point is irrelevant. The real question, to which nobody has an answer, is this: what do we do as a society when a small number of private companies corner the market for an essential part of modern life and then institute arbitrary criteria for refusing service to people? How this situation came about doesn't matter. Uber making all drivers full employees would not change the dynamic one bit.

Complaining about Uber's employment model instead of discussing this really important control question just annoys me. It deflects a potentially interesting conversation into grievance-airing about gig jobs.

It's somewhat relevant because it was plain as a day through continued behaviour that Uber is a sociopathic company. So while not all companies would follow the mechanic in question, and different companies may follow it at different pace, it was always obvious that Uber will screw riders over as soon as possible.

What we do? Well, that's what antitrust laws and offices are for. In Europe they tend to work quite nicely.

>>How this situation came about doesn't matter.

On the contrary, we need to really understand how we got here first, in order to be able to recognize patterns of the problem and determine how to avoid it in the future.

As the saying goes, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.

It’s irrelevant that a company is able to skirt regulation? Would Uber be in the position to “institute arbitrary criteria” if they had to compete in an environment with proper governance being in place?

The crux of your argument is we shouldn’t care about how we get there but what happens next or essentially, how do we react.

If you want to solve a problem, identify and fix the root cause instead of reactively applying some patch to cover the bleeding.

Getting “annoyed” at someone discussing the root cause is misguided.

Why is it tired? Because you don’t agree with it?

I would argue that your comment is the bad comment. Lots of unproven assertions, and it all began with a needless, toxic attack

Fair point. I was a bit easy to comment. But there's a public side to my point. Services can be wiped with such business models which is detrimental to society. Amazon pushed a lot of people aside, now their prices are all but guaranteed to be fair.

How is Uber anywhere near a monopoly? Also, taxi companies were worse in all your criteria, Uber is actually an improvement regardless.

No, they weren't. Taxi companies operated legally. Uber routinely broke the law.

Also it still perplexes me that Uber managed to convince so many people with their bullshit PR campaign about the small upstart facing the Taxi Mafia - when from the beginning it was a heavily-funded company, later turned multinational corporation, fighting small local providers with underhand tactics.

Taxi companies provided a horrible customer experience, routinely discriminated, and often defrauded their customers. I know because I suffered from it long before Uber ever existed.

I'm not trying to excuse Uber but taxi companies in some places also routinely broke the law by refusing to travel to certain areas, pick up some minority passengers, or accept credit cards. In theory they were accountable to local taxi commissions but in practice that was totally ineffective in forcing drivers to obey the law.

And, in addition, in many places taxi companies became a cartel: remember the TLC medallion madness where some crooks were reaping the cream of the crop.

It sounds like you've never been stranded late at night waiting hours for a cab that was "5 minutes away." I don't participate in the bar scene anymore. I don't benefit from the increased user experience of knowing exactly where your cab is, and if they cancel. Legal or not, I sure am glad those jackasses got their comeuppance.

It still perplexes me that people believe that Uber needed to convince anyone about Taxi mafia. The taxis in US are amazingly backwards -- for example, there were no online tracking, no pre-defined fares, and no online ordering.

I remember having to use "car services" just because the taxis were so unpleasant.

It actually wasn't Uber + Lyft (or their class better UXs) that convinced me. It was a taxi cab driver turned Uber + Lyft driver who looked at me incredulously when I asked him if Uber/Lyft was worth it.

"You bet ya!", he said, "I'm on vacation!" he said. He went on to talk about how the taxi cab industry was a dirty industry and uber/lyft reformed it.

Meanwhile one of my journalist friends declaims the "tyranny" of Uber/Lyft. It's not hyperbole its simply inaccurate.

> No, they weren't. Taxi companies operated legally. Uber routinely broke the law.

No, they didn't. At least, not in most US cities - I don't know how the laws work abroad. All a taxi medallion does is allow you to accept rides from people that hail you from the street. That's it. Limo companies and vans that you scheduled beforehand did not need medallions. There's functionally not much different from the service Uber provides and existing charter services, except for the fact that Uber used technology to make scheduling rides much faster.

The "Taxi Mafia" very much existed, though calling it a cartel is probably more accurate. Governments deliberately constrained the supply of taxis through medallions. Naturally, this resulted in inflated prices and poor service due to lack of competition. There's a reason why many people have little sympathy for the taxi industry's struggles to compete with ride sharing: taxis sucked.

Taxi had a lot of substandard features. But their employees weren't random guys without insurance nor training. They also had some semblance of career. I don't know all, but many Uber drivers didn't get their investment back yet and changing prices and rules make it a risky bet.

Even in the USA, that wasn’t true, let alone outside of the states. Taxi drivers don’t make back their investment (car/medallion rental) often, much more than an Uber driver who can use their own car and need no medallion at all. And...career as a taxi driver? There is a reason driving a cab is on the low wrung of new immigrant jobs, you can barely survive on it.

I guess they did have insurance (again, at least in the states), but so do Uber drivers.

I knew it wasn't the easiest job but the few I know raised their family and owned nice houses so I assumed it was ok.

Maybe 30 years ago that was true? Definitely not today, well, for some definition of raise a family I guess. If you are doing it to support your family back in Nigeria, it could work out.

yeah yeah maybe I was sampling the previous generation

I took a cab from the las vegas airport to my hotel recently as I was in a hurry and didn't know where the uber pick up area was. When we got to the hotel, suprise suprise, the credit card machine was broken and it took a 15 minute call for the driver to get things sorted and charge the card manually via calling his dispatcher.

I abhor cabs.

From my experience, the credit card machine is always broken.

You carry no cash?

I agree Uber's not a monopoly, but I also think crappy taxi companies are a local problem.

I don't use Uber or taxis often, but have used both several times over the years. There's never been a practical difference for me. If anything, Uber is less convenient because I need to sign up and install an app. Maybe one was a little cheaper, but not so much that I noticed.

I recently landed in a small airport late at night and tried to get a (non-uber) cab... Yes, Uber is a monopoly.

> This is basically capital cancer, they had a real value but dismissed everything a company is to a society:

> - stable for employees

> - stable for users

> - stable for society

No. Stability comes at the expense of dynamism. Innovation disrupts stability, and society is more often than not better off for it. You pay a needless tax whenever you buy a CD or flash drive which gets handed off to record companies in the presumption that you will pirate music. Politicians decided that the music industry needed more stability, and passed laws to make consumers fork over tax money to subsidize them.

There was a push to make ride-share companies wait at least 30 minutes before pairing riders up with a car. Not to guarantee any sort of safety or to fight congestion. It was literally just degrading service in order to make taxi companies more competitive with Uber, Lyft, etc.

Trying to achieve stability frequently hurts users and degrades quality of service.

Exactly. A few companies ruling our lives is just as bad as a government doing the same thing.

It's worse. We can elect a new government.

This has been a particular problem for the handicapped community as I understand it, as the service speed for handicapped vehicles has been much worse.

Don't taxis have the same problem?

Not just that, but when I was on crutches my rating dramatically dropped. I almost always had a friend with me to help out with storing the crutches and getting in and out of the car, but regardless my rating fell at least a tenth. Drivers probably didn’t like how I needed to grab onto their car to enter and exit, or maybe that the crutches were in their car, or that the whole process took a bit longer.

I do think drivers should be required to justify a <5 star rating for riders.

Isn’t that to be expected given the need for a special vehicle?

Report on WAV availability in NY

https://nylpi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Still-Left-Behi...

Uber - 96% WAV availability, 6 min WAV wait time

Lyft - 63% WAV availability, 12 min WAV wait time

Taxis already discriminated against users they perceived to be problems. In New York, if you were a minority or headed somewhere outside Manhattan on the airports, good luck finding a cab.

I don’t believe that Uber and Lyft have made the problem significantly worse than it already was.

Maybe, but allowing them to enshrine this in policy without challenge is a mistake.

There is a big difference between individual taxi drivers refusing to take a specific fare at a specific moment in time and a company that controls a large percentage of ground transportation denying someone access to it forever.

It's like the difference between an injury and a chronic disease.

So if Uber taxi drivers made their own decision based on a aggregate score history you would be fine?

No. I'm not even sure that is a different class of problem.

I'm generally not a big fan of database driven black lists.

They have all the problems of bad decisions individuals make with much more impact and much less recourse.

No, I think they should be fired and not allowed to work in public transportation for some time, and only then after some rehab/training. People can change, after all. But this is a different issue with different sorts of solutions.

It is really more like having one cashier at a grocery store refuse to ring you up as opposed to the grocery store chain not allowing you inside because the cashiers decided you weren't delightful enough, even if that was because your child was loud a few times.

When it is the cashier, you have a bit of recourse, after all. When it is the chain, you have very little recourse and not only that, but now you have to figure out where else to shop. It might not be so bad in a town with many grocery stores, but it'll be mighty inconvenient if you have to drive to the next town to shop.

Actually that would be much better, right?

I'm struggling with the whole "Orwellian" angle, if Uber is going to start keeping jerks from using their service.

Today it's Uber's jerks, tomorrow it's people accused of being jerks elsewhere on the internet.

That doesn't really make any sense.

Low-star riders make the drivers' experiences worse. That's why they're low rated.

I'm not arguing against the idea that low-star riders make drivers' experiences worse and that's why they have low ratings. I'm arguing against the idea that a "social metric", which can be changed and expanded (to include, hypothetically, your credit score), should be used to deny access to services, without strong guarantees about the sources and other aspects of that social metric.

The Orwellian aspect is when companies start sharing their scores, and when those scores start having clearly highly subjective influences.

After watching some videos of what Uber drivers have to put up with, as well as having a few friends that work in retail, some kind of "social metric" may not be the worst thing.

As a society, we put up with a lot of terrible behavior and people get away with it because they don't care about making a scene or situation that is uncomfortable for everyone else. We pay higher prices to deal with these people's behavior: constantly complaining until they get free stuff, abusing return policies, review blackmail, vandalizing state/national parks, cutting lines, etc.

You're right though that we need very strong guarantees around the sources and accuracy of such a metric.

I had a very similar reaction 25ish years ago when I found out as a teen credit agencies exist and were somehow not illegal (but employment blacklists are).

Don't worry - I was told they are optional, and you only need them for major things like if you getting a new car or house financed. Anyone worried about these things were mocked with the slippery slope "fallacy" typically being the counterargument.

Of course scope creep inevitably happened - and now you are effectively locked out of many parts of society if you have a poor credit score. We were told it was outright illegal to use credit scores when hiring people (again, 25 years ago) so our fears were unjustified.

Now we're running credit reports on entry level warehouse positions, some volunteer jobs, etc. With every reason to believe it's going to get more pervasive.

As these "social rating" systems get more normalized with consumers, I fully expect to see "novel" new uses and data sharing starting to happen.

Who gets to decide who counts as a jerk? You? Think of somebody who's a jerk. Would you want that person at Uber deciding whether you should get a ride?

This question of "who decides?" is essential. I see snarky response after snarky response that ignores how power and authority corrupt decision-making.

I hope we can all agree that the decision to bar someone from participating in important ways in society should not rest on the unsupervised whims of people in Bay Area meeting rooms.

I believe that it's the drivers setting the score isn't it?

It’s pretty obvious who decides who is the jerk, the drivers. If you have an average of like 1 Star, is every single driver you’ve ever ridden with wrong? I think this is fine, they’re not drawing an arbitrary line, they’re saying wow if this person has made drivers rate him this badly then they shouldn’t be using the service. This seems entirely reasonable to me - I’ve ridden with some real assholes and don’t take Pool anymore as a result.

“Jerk” could mean anything though. “Jerk” could be girls that don’t flirt back. Or mothers with small children. Or disabled people needing more time getting in and out of the car.

Are you aware of any anecdotes of people saying their rating fell when they didn't flirt back or got on crutches or something? (Your point is still valid even if you don't, I'm just interested)

My Uber rating fell noticeably while I was on crutches for around 6 months, it has since risen. This is in Boston.

My rating drops when I want to go somewhere far away or in busy traffic, I don't feel like talking to drivers or just use uber pool / lyft line.

The big one no one is talking about are non-tippers.

It's becoming downright common for Uber drivers to outright admit they give 1 star ratings for non-cash-tippers.

But yes, I've anecdotally heard of ratings drop for women who typically are type-A chatty, but changed to quiet and withdrawn for a few weeks during major life events. Perhaps that came across as more surely, but just something as silly as someone perceiving a bad attitude from a rider can results in a lower rating score.

I've also talked to drivers who give poor ratings if they have to go well out of their way, and it ends up being a short ride. Sure, this really sucks for the driver - but is it the rider's fault at all? Other unpopular destinations get similar treatment (or so I've heard).

Just one driver? Just ten? Who decides what the threshold should be? And what happens when Uber and Lyft decide to ban riders for criteria other than their star rating? Other tech companies have begun to ban people for reasons having nothing to do with their behavior online.

Is getting a Uber/Taxi an inalienable right? While the process is new, it's entirely possible they could have banned your account previous to this.

If they use their momentary advantage to push out other legitimate options for transit, then there is a good argument for regulation protecting riders.

Maybe Uber shouldn't be making any decisions about users. Just present the rating to the driver pool and let drivers decide who they pick up and who they do not. It doesn't entirely solve the issue of "what is a justifiable reason for rating a rider (or driver) poorly?" but it makes it less catastrophic for users.

Given that taxi's were the only legitimate option for transport before this, were there regulations protecting riders from being banned?

“Jerks” can be “people who are disabled and require more time getting in and out of the car”. Being on crutches, for instance, will cause your rating to fall. (At least that was my experience while in Boston)

Well the good thing about a marketplace is that when you act poorly at one business, you can still visit another one.

Uber isn't and shouldn't be the only option available to people. The laws that force every company to offer everything to everyone without question are almost always the markets with only one option.

All you're left with is a pseudo-market that offers few of the benefits of real private or public markets. A pretend public service with even less accountability and fewer people profiting from the industry.

> Well the good thing about a marketplace is that when you act poorly at one business, you can still visit another one.

We’re quickly heading to an Uber/Lyft duopoly. And they use similar ratings systems. Soooooo, I’m not sure what your point is. This isn’t a market, it’s a VC funded takeover of transportation.

Ride hailing apps are the only forms of transportation now?

It's been documented that drivers have rated riders low for not giving a tip or not leaving a review... Are those really "jerks"?

Drivers have no way of knowing if someone will tip/review before they are prompted for a rating. Drivers rate riders immediately after the ride finishes.

> Whether a cash tip or given through an app, 85 percent of drivers agreed that not tipping was a factor in passengers’ ratings.

https://driving-tests.org/confessions-of-an-uber-driver/

> Uber drivers have long been known to give passengers low ratings if they suspect a passenger is going to give them a low rating.

https://www.ridester.com/uber-passengers-ratings-sting/

So, yes, they don't base it off the actual review (that may be a service other than Uber that I'm recalling), but they'll often base your review off the review they expect you to give them.

Seems legit. /s

Successful, long-time drivers do not waste there time with this pettiness. Nor do they waste time talking to reporters about insignificant issues like this when that time could be better spent actually making money. I've been driving on and off for 5 years now and all us veterans on the Facebook groups laugh at how silly all the constant nitpicking is.

As with any rating system, there will be outlying bad raters. That's why it is normal for absolutely no one to have a perfect 5 star. It's really not a bid deal.

You’re creating a bit of a “No true Scotsman” fallacy. “No ‘veteran’ driver would rate someone based on tips or their expected rating.”

Yet people are being rated on their tips. People are being rated based on their expected ratings of the driver, regardless of their “success” as a driver.

It’s a big deal because it locks someone out of a system that has forced out its competition (illegally in some cases; such as in London).

But the drivers (and some customers) are who wanted the tipping system.

I remember all the articles / suggestion that public transit contract with Uber to fill gaps in public transit, or even just to establish it in some areas. That seemed like a horrible idea to contract with a company whose entire existence has been bleeding money....

I got a lot of crap online when raising questions about such ideas from folks I think of as technology fans who really embrace all the disruption and all these convenient things these companies promise etc. Fortunately I see less of that these days.

I struggle to see how anything you described could be categorized as "Orwellian"... Why are we concerned about "problem users" being left with no options? Just act like a normal human and you won't be a problem user... What is "Orwellian" about free markets and voluntary exchange?

I would bet skin colour and gender show up in these scores, as would many disabilities.

"problem users" doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means.

The beautiful thing about this comment is that the sentence "Just act like a normal human and you won't be a problem user." would have fit _perfectly_ in 1984.

Just accept 2+2=5 and you won't have any issues!

If the government were mandating people behave a certain way, that would be an entirely different discussion. We're talking about a service that people can choose to use or not use. If they want to use it, they have to comply with the standards set by the service provider...

It's "Orwellian" because people are being judged "problem users" without due process. There's no jury of peers, no possibility of appeal, just an opaque judgment from a private company concerned only with their own profit. If a company becomes a de facto monopoly then they are de facto part of the government, and should be held to government standards.

In the US, at least, they don’t have to be a monopoly to be held to non-discrimination standards. And unless there’s a huge investment in “Uber due process”, this is one-click cloud-powered discrimination.

They quite literally are being judged by a jury of their peers... that is kind of my whole point.

"Yeah, I mean jeez, what is it with people who can't, like, walk right and stuff? What's even their whole deal? They should just act normal and then it wouldn't be a problem any more!"

I'm not going to make any comparisons to novels or anything. I'm just going to tell you you're acting like an asshole, and you should think about not doing that.

Is it "Orwellian" of me to ban toxic users from my game servers, and share my ban list with other people running servers in my community?

It depends how big you are. To be "Orwellian" requires scale.

Why is it right if I have 500 users but wrong if I have 1 million users?

Well, it is not necessarily right if you have 500 users, but I would call it dictatorial rather than orwellian. And it could certainly be a benevolent dictatorship with the right dictator.

The problem with the 1,000,000 users is it becomes harder and harder to have informed people make reasoned decisions based on good information, so you end up relying on processes and proxies. Data and reports. And then you create rules like "whenever data point X reaches threshold Y action Z will be taken". And it is a good rule. Not a perfect rule, because perfect rules are really really hard. And maybe the rule can be gamed a bit. Griefed a bit. And this makes people unhappy and they start complaining, but there are so many of them and they were the ones breaking the rules anyway, and there really isn't time to look into all these complaints, and its impossible to figure out exactly what happened without reading through terabytes of logs so the rules are the rules and people just need to follow them. And so what if they just got a life ban because of a momentary lapse of reason or because an organized group filed a series of false complaints. Life is too short to coddle whiners and toxic people.

And then you are orwellian.

Scale and impact -- banning people from international tic-tac-toe monopoly is not a big deal, unless participation is socially or otherwise required.

I agree with this in general but how does this relate to the article? Uber removing bad riders from the app is clearly a move to protect the drivers. I disagree with the sentiment that this is somehow unethical.

private company becomes defacto monopoly in many cases - private company withdraws service from problem users - those users are left with no options

However, the pattern as it often plays out in the late 20th and early 21st century has a wrinkle: Private company lets competitors occupy distant 2nd and 3rd positions in order to deflect charges of monopoly. The dominant company might even buy stock in the distant competitors to help keep them afloat.

But the final result is beyond Orwellian.

In 2019, if someone gets banned from Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, is there a viable mainstream alternative?

This hasn’t happened at all with Uber? Taxis are still a thing, transit hasn’t been shut down because of Uber. Revenues might be down, yes, but Uber is not remotely approaching a monopoly.

The 5 star rating system being used reminds me a lot of eBay's feedback system. eBay's system has changed quite a lot over the years, and much could be said about each change they made, but specifically the 5 star system and the bar they set was always problematic because of the disconnect between what buyers thought a fair rating was vs what eBay considered fair.

In eBay land, anything less than 5 stars is unacceptable, but for most normal people if you asked them they might say 3 stars is fair for a perfectly acceptable experience. If you get too many 3 star ratings from happy satisfied customers your average might drop from 4.9 to 4.7 and suddenly you're on thin ice and at risk of having your account closed.

Looking at this article it appears Uber is using a similar system. They require an average rating of 4.6-- meaning every 4 star review you get is actually a ding against you-- even though those 4 star reviews might've been perfectly happy riders who just felt in their minds that 4 = Good, 5 = Outstanding or something.

eBay is a great example of a feedback system with different expectations than a naive user might assume.

I used it mostly when you had positive, neutral, and negative. One might think that taking a few extra days to ship something or an item not being in quite as pristine condition as advertised was probably a good candidate for a neutral. Not bad/not perfect.

But that wasn't really the expectation. Neutral was more like "It took me two weeks of emailing but I finally heard back from the seller and they shipped the item which really wasn't as described but I just wanted the transaction done at that point" Negative was "They shipped me a box full of bricks and made me pay the postage."

The local bus service in my city between the Bay Area and Sacramento reduced frequency and coverage last year. Their suggestion was to just use a ride-sharing app. It's not just cab companies.

You should add the first step: investors make a pile of money so huge that existing service can't possibly compete.

Strikes me as something that may violate “failure to haul” laws in many municipalities. While there are a lot of egregious, openly racist, refusals by (e.g, NYC) cabbies to pick up black or Latino riders, chasing down individual cabbies means that local commissions rarely show their teeth on that issue. But going after a giant centralized concern, especially one now answerable to shareholders, is a different story.

Is there a single city anywhere in the world where "Uber" is the only option for transportation?

There are cities without Uber. But I can't think of a city that has no taxis and only has Uber...

Yikes, reading this comment section is pretty eerie. People discussing a number that people who were paid for a service have given them.

I'm glad I've never really needed Uber, traditional taxis have their problems but there's no scoring involved.

Edit - Missed a few words.

I really can't tell if it's satire or not, it's so bizarre. Everyone talking about the lengths to which they go to get a good passenger rating. How friendly, and social, and polite they are to the drivers they're hiring? I'm not saying be an ass, but when I hire a driver I want them to drive, I'm not really interested in chatting with them. Nothing against them, I'm just not interested in that.

Yeah, I'm the same. If I get into a taxi I'll make sure I'm ready when they turn up, say 'hey' and then sit there.

Maybe they think I'm rude, but I've paid them and thanked them, and I've not caused them any trouble.

I'm not from America, so maybe it's slightly more acceptable to do that but I could just be using stereotypes of Americans to explain the taxi scoring behavior.

You can do that to and it'll be fine. Some people are truly assholes and they get bad ratings.

Turns out that people like to generally interact with one another, and those that don't like doing that are judged as being less good.

I rate you as a 3/5.

Are we going to start giving shoppers a 'shopper' rating? People who don't talk enough to the cashier won't be served?

It's crazy this system is perfectly acceptable.. But the Chinese system aiming to do the exact same thing? Completely unacceptable...

I think that the general public is more okay with these systems than we think. I personally find them abhorrent.

This is great. If you are a shitty human being, and you are toxic to the workforce, then you get banned.

Unfortunately people are shitty and this is a very much needed feature to avoid abuse of drivers.

It could be great, but it could go the other way too - drivers giving low ratings to minorities, or folk that live outside of the urban core.

One of Uber's selling points was that it avoided the kind of discrimination that taxis were famous for.

I'm not a taxi driver, and I don't know any but I'm not sure how widespread toxic riders is.

I've heard of taxi drivers complaining about drunks, people with food and stuff, but AFAIK taxi drivers in the UK are allowed to refuse service for things like this.

Doing something about "those people" is a common refrain when justifying poor ideas.

If the system were such that drivers would only leave negative feedback on exceptionally bad encounters, with a specifically described complaint, it could plausibly work as you state.

But as it stands, your "shitty human being" is likely to not be correlated with a poor average rating - imagine a run of the mill douchebag that talks themselves up to everyone they meet, yet is an abusive asshole when it benefits them. Such a person is likely to have a higher passenger rating than a genuinely nice person who is socially awkward.

All systems calcify, become overprescriptive, and get gamed by people with nothing better to do. This setup is ripe for that, and Uber's / Surveillance Valley's general stance towards accountability doubles the worry.

You're hypocrite because you want this feature for drivers but not riders.

I almost always pool when using Uber/Lyft, and this filters people I wouldn't want as co-riders out too.

I think it makes a lot of sense for Uber Pool, at least, because shitty riders make the experience worse for other riders. The last time I took a Pool, we picked up someone who booked the ride for one person but had a friend with her. She tried to argue and say she would give the driver a tip at the end, etc., while the driver tried to explain that it doesn't work that way. Wasted about 5 to 10 minutes of my day because of that.

Uber has went from something magical to a pretty stressful experience filled with paranoia about how two people are silently judging each other for perceived transgressions that don't fit with unstated and unwritten expectations.

For instance, maybe a year ago or so, one day driving back from work my car was acting up. I decided to avoid driving it for a day or two until I could get it into a shop to be inspected. So the next morning I used Uber to get to work. Now, I don't live that far from work -- it's maybe a 3-4 minute drive. Evidently, some Uber drivers get pretty upset about short rides like that. I got what I assume must have been a 1 star rating from the driver based on the large impact it had on my rider score.

This and similar "incidents" have dropped my rating to 4.69. It was actually lower not too long ago, at maybe 4.66 I believe, but I've been trying to get it back up by giving oversized cash tips (I've always tipped in the past, just usually digitally and in an amount that was more proportional, say 10-20%). Given that 4.6 is the apparent cutoff, I suspect I'll be avoiding Uber as much as I can going forward. I've always been nothing but kind and respectful -- though also quiet and reticent -- and I don't feel like worrying about this anymore.

I'm a polite person, but I sometimes wear drag or makeup or gender non-conforming outfits. I also use Uber frequently in areas that are less tolerant than the Bay Area.

The last time me and my friends played a game of "share your Uber rating" on Facebook, my Uber rating was lower than nearly all my friends. Coincidence?

I instinctively find this utterly repulsive, evil, no different to China’s social credit scoring. How can an average of 4.6 be meaningful for determining fitness to ride - that’s a rediculous number. A mechanism for preventing truly abusive or violent riders should be based on specific reporting and video evidence, not a dumb aggregate score. I am generally against regulation if possible, but this insane policy requires urgent remedy by regulators, Uber is becoming an important part of our travel infrastructure, so requires regulation just like rail, air etc.

I foresee a class action suit in the near future. Handicapped people take longer to get in and out of the car. Uber’s rate them lower for it (this has been my personal experience, Boston). With this, handicapped people are denied services because of their handicap. Cut and dry violation of ADA (or whatever it is that determines protected classes).

I just don't think the cliff Uber will use for cutting off riders is going to be "got 3* a few times for taking too long to get in and out of a car." Drivers aren't quitting Uber because of those riders. They're going to be cutting off people routinely rated 1* for being dangerously intoxicated, ranting about minorities, making passes at drivers, etc.

Or riders asking for a U-turn on the highway.

If you also your Uber driver they all have amazing stories of unreasonable riders.

The problem is that usually when a place decides to refuse service to a person, there is a single person making that decision who can be held accountable for it in the event an issue comes up with protected classes. What people “think the cliff will be” is irrelevant, the problem is lack of accountability. There is no way to show that they aren’t violating protected statuses, and there is no accountability if they are.

The cutoff is 4.6, which could be achieved by just 1 bad rating out of 10.

(E.g. one 1 star and 9 5 star reviews)

It all depends on how low they set the rating lower bound.

The Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” comes to mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)

“The episode is set in a world where people can rate each other from one to five stars for every interaction they have, which can impact their socioeconomic status”

Anecdotally it looks like I have a 4.75 rider rating which I was hit by a low rating one time because the driver cancelled the ride probably because it wasn’t very far or some other reason. Extending this to real world penalties changes behavior. Ever do a customer interaction where the seller (say a car dealer or a mortgage broker) tells you a survey will be coming and to please rate then 5 stars?

I was banned from Uber for getting a refund on a ride that never came to pick me up. 13 lifetime rides from 2015 until 2017. Their recruiters still reach out to me on a regular basis.

I wonder when a secondary market will open for highly rated Uber accounts. I can see a future where you have to buy a 4.8 account so that you can get a taxi at peak times.

That will be easily detectable by Uber

Never underestimate the power of a market to make something come about.

Maybe or maybe not. If it is then it will just kick off an arms race.

Although, if Uber really knows what they're doing, then they'll allow the buying and selling of accounts and then take a percentage of the sale.

So I call in and ask to have a high-rated account summon an Uber to my location. Of course it would make sense to centralize this. Congratulations, we've reinvented taxi dispatch.

This is fantastic. If the markups are high enough, I can imagine people who have the job of just taking uber rides all day to grind up ratings for good passenger uber accounts. Reminiscent of faction grinding in MMOs. Life imitates art.

Well, we already gamified exercise and productivity, why not gamify social status and access to services!

The logical conclusion of this is eventually you end up with something like China's social credit system ( https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-p... ).

If it has to happen, not sure which I like least - a system controlled by private companies or a system controlled by government.

And in three years we'll get leaked data showing there's a racial disparity in ratings, and there'll be some lawsuit about the racist algorithm.

The thing is though that the ratings are given by humans. No algorithms here. Which means there are almost definitely going to be racial disparity. Even if we assume the ultimate ideal of nobody who uses uber is a racist, cognitive biases are a real thing and you're not going to be able to stamp them out in the large.

Algorithms do not create racism out of thin air, all the racial preferences are in the data. This didn't stop a bunch of projects from becoming crucified in the media recently.

Algorithms don't run themselves. Humans chose to make them and chose to ignore bias in their data.

I read an MIT study which said Uber pays women less than men, and they pay according to an algorithm that does not use sex as a factor. Would you have anticipated a lawsuit there?

This should be problematic. Uber should not be in the position of choosing who is served by its business.

The whole “ratings” aspect is preposterous. There’s no independent way to appeal a rating and get redress. It’s just as bad as 360 reviews—at least 360 reviews are a blunt tool to unload underperformers.

I think these app ratings systems are worse and should not be enough to ban a passenger.

I disagree, the ratings are averages, so outliers should be naturally smoothed out. You should not need to appeal any 1 (or 2) bad ratings, if the rest of your ratings keep your average up. However, if you are consistently being rated such that your average is in the 3's, maybe you need to think about how you conduct yourself along the way.

First, out of principle I have an issue with a middling rating of “3” being “bad”. One should be “bad”, two needs improvement, etc.

That said, imagine if Walmart or Wholefoods banned customers because they had middling ratings. If they shoplift, vandalize, (is in Uber’s case vomitus, vandalizing, assault, etc.) They should follow with criminal complaints, etc.

My problem is with unilateral banning —not the banning in principle as there are some good cases for it, but they are rare.

The threshold for banning needs to be scrutinized for essential services. There's potential to really hurt people's quality of life, particularly people that are already disadvantaged. An arbitrary star rating scale with no clear definitions is definitely not appropriate.

Public transit doesn't ban you if you're loud or smelly. Private rideshare may. As rideshare takes over ridership from transit, mobility is removed from loud and smelly people.

The threshold should be: a criminal complaint was filed.

I tend to agree - critical services like transportation should have some oversight in how they're gatekeeping. Another example is Stripe - some small number of users are incorrectly flagged by their fraud detection and couldn't use a large number of services that have Stripe as their payment processor.

If any Product Manager at Uber is remotely decent at their job, they'd pull out the rating system for both drivers and riders ASAP. The system makes no sense when everyone on both sides are forced to give a 5 star rating whether you were treated like royalty or just been dropped off at your stop like a countless other identical rides because the floor is at 4.6. Have an issue with a driver/rider? Create a system where both can file a complaint with proper reasoning to be provided, or else we can go about our day like literally every other commercial transaction you have.

Why does that make no sense? Why is the idea of giving 5 stars for an average ride so offensive to you?

Because it's at the extreme end of the rating system.

That turns the system into "average or better" and various states of bad.

That's a stupid system. It means 4 ratings are completely useless to everyone. They don't really mean anything.

The entire system needs to be junked. It only turns the rating into currency. Where drivers and riders use it to punish each other rather than be honest.

There needs to be only one rating "Bad ride". And it needs to be complicated enough to reach that it can't be done as a reaction. From there, you can devise a rating based on the number of bad ride flags you've gotten compared to the rest of the population.

You do it compared to the population so it can't be done punitively. If everyone is spamming "bad ride", it doesn't matter. The system picks up on it.

I dont use Uber, when they say fall below a 4.6, is that on a scale of 1 - 10? If Uber were smart they'd just charge these problem customers more money. it'd help them financially and kill two birds with one stone.

I wish Uber would get rid of their executives/employees that also dont meet this "Safety and Respect" policy they are imposing on users. The company has such a reputation of being a deplorable company this is a really two-faced policy. Do as I say, not as we do.

It's a 1-5 scale

> riders ... are now at risk of deactivation if their rating falls significantly below a city’s average.

Of course that raises the average which therefore exposes a new cohort at the bottom to being below the average.

I understand the idea of removing people who won't get picked up anyway, but this seems like a bug.

Also: what factors go into a rating? I have relatives (thankfully not uber drivers) who would downrate a customer solely on racial grounds.

So many comments in this thread I can't tell if they're satirical or not - I feel like that episode of Black Mirror has less obviously outrageous statements than this thread.

I think this goes to show the unintended negative consequences that can apply when you take a generally good idea and start applying a "false precision" rating system to it - Goodhart's law and all that.

I generally give 5 stars because giving a low rating (a) could cost me, by leading the driver to retaliate with a low rating for me, and (b) has negligible benefit to me.

Note that I only use Uber when traveling on business to large cities. So my policy described above always impacts me, but has never impacted any particular Uber driver more than once.

> I generally give 5 stars because giving a low rating (a) could cost me, by leading the driver to retaliate with a low rating for me, and (b) has negligible benefit to me.

Someone said elsewhere in this thread that the driver only sees your rating after they've rated you. Although I'm not sure if it's possible for them to go back and change their rating of you if they see you've rated them poorly.

I thought I've read somewhere that drivers don't actually see individual riders' ratings of them, only the average over all riders.

The problem is that the rating is a bargaining chip and there is no way around that issue.

The rating is currency and is being treated as such.

In all honesty, there should be a "Flag bad ride" and nothing else. No positive ratings. If it was a good ride, you just do nothing. Your rating should be a rolling average of the number of flags you've gotten compared to the population with the more recent flags being weighted more.

That way if you're not flagged as often as most people, it won't matter. Your rating will take a temporary dip. If you're flagged more often than average, it means something.

And flagging a bad ride should be a fairly involved process to prevent people from just using it on a whim. In order to flag a ride, you should have to expend some effort for it.

I have a bad rating. I live close to the airport and from work. Short trips, cheap rides. The drivers give me bad rating so they know to not pick me up, cancel me, or call me asking my destination.

I complained to Uber several times, they always throw me a $5 or $10 credit, but no solution. They also don't change my rating.

> Common Carrier

...

> A common carrier is legally bound to carry all passengers or freight as long as there is enough space, the fee is paid, and no reasonable grounds to refuse to do so exist. A common carrier that unjustifiably refuses to carry a particular person or cargo may be sued for damages.

food for thought.

What if we find that certain protected classes tend to have a lower rating than others? Would Uber banning them constitute racism/religious discrimination/*phobia? Would there be grounds for a class action if not an outright discrimination suit?

Uber needs to add an "I'm traveling with children" option. I had a 5 star rider rating until I started traveling with the kids. The kids are quiet and don't make a mess, but it takes longer to get in and out of the car, because the law (and safety) dictate using car seats. There's not much I can do there.

I'd be perfectly willing to pay an extra fee when traveling with my kids that goes straight to the driver to make up for the extra time and to incentivize them to select me as a rider, because they would know they're getting the "kids bonus". And then maybe I wouldn't get dinged on my rider rating just for having kids with me.

Yes, an "I'm travelling with dogs" option would also be quite useful. Some drivers love them and some hate them and are paranoid their car is going to be ruined the entire ride. It'd be better for both rider & driver if this matching were done automatically.

Most riders would probably be fine with a small additional fee.

Uh-Oh. My rider rating is 4.21. I use Uber maybe 15x a year, mostly on vacation with my family. I would guess that my rating has taken a hit due to my kids crying, kicking seats, Etc.

I would like to note that I always tip well and give a 5 star rating to every driver I use.

I have had a couple drivers cancel on me. One came within 50 yards of us at the Disneyworld parking lot, then turned around and left, while we were waving them down.

The problem with Uber ratings is that most people use them as binary. A small number of 1 starts will quickly bring your rating below average. I used to take short rides to and from work daily for some time and it seems my rating took a large hit. I frequently saw a lot of drivers giving me 1 stars. I know a lot of people (riders), who frequently give 1 stars. I think it would be better if Uber replaces the 5 start system with 3 or 2 stars.

Hmm, so say you get rid of the worst 10% of riders, because they're "significantly below average". But that then pushes up the average, so you get rid of another 10%. Repeat until everyone is top marks?

And its based on city, so if you get banned in your own city, could you get a ride in your own city? What about the opposite?

What happens when you go on holiday to X, but aren't aware of cultural norm Y. Are you then barred when you get home?

On Uber, drivers don’t have much choice not to take a toxic passenger regardless of their rating, or they get dinged for excessive cancellation. Passengers don’t have much choice not to take a badly rated driver or they get dinged for cancelling. So, realistically, star ratings are only useful for the platform to know which drivers or passengers are unwanted. Otherwise, star ratings really aren’t much use. This is very unlike other platforms, like eBay or Amazon, where users can choose who to buy goods/services from based on star ratings.

Of course, this isn’t in support of this deactivation of riders at all - taxi companies are regulated in most places so they can’t refuse a fare without cause, and Uber really should be subject to similar regulation. Otherwise, losing access to Uber could seriously disenfranchise certain populations. I’d be happier if they would just ditch star ratings for passengers entirely, and just rely on driver complaints - but this is probably wishful thinking.

>For drivers, they face a risk of deactivation if they fall below 4.6

That's nuts. Why would I as a passenger have any reason to think giving a driver 4 stars means I'm putting him at risk of being fired? Not only is this losing good drivers their jobs but it's propagating a false narrative that all Uber drivers provide flawless experiences.

Why deactivate at all? Why not let drivers and riders set a threshold for each side of the transaction?

That would be more in line with drivers being independent contractors instead of employees.

But, based on the article, it sounds like getting banned from Uber will be a very rare occurrence.

They said it would affect people with scores <4.6, which is high enough to catch a lot of people.

That's for drivers, not for riders

It’s not the average that matters - it’s the number of 1-stars or rides where the passenger felt the driver was highly unacceptable. A driver might be perfectly safe and polite to a majority of customers, but a danger to vulnerable people or different groups of people. It would be good, for example, the app to overweight low ratings from young women - with almost no tolerance for 1-star ratings from that group.

It would also be good if the ride share companies share details of the most scary drivers who have been ousted, so that they don’t get two or three shots.

> young women - with almost no tolerance for 1-star ratings from that group

Why should that be?

"It would be good, for example, the app to overweight low ratings from young women - with almost no tolerance for 1-star ratings from that group."

This is sexist and ageist.

I assumed they were already doing that. I've seen several TV shows or movies (recently Booksmart) where "I can't use uber because of my low passenger rating" was used as a plot device.

Ugh! What happens when you are travelling to a different City? I have seen different rating patterns in different cities where my rating goes up if I am in a certain city for an extended period. So, I would assume that city has on average a higher rider rating. Will they calculate my average from that city's rides?

Also, if they are taking into account that city's ratings if I travel to a new country what's the threshold number of rides to calculate my new rating? Will I be randomly locked out of Uber in the middle of night in a foreign city.

A privately run social credit system?

it can't be bad, because it's not the government doing it!

Wouldn't it make more sense to have some sort of "Flag rider for community guidelines violation" button, as opposed to using star ratings for this?

Stars are subjective. Many people seem to think that "five stars" means a normal ride with nothing to complain about. Personally, I think a normal ride should be three stars—five stars should mean you went above and beyond in some way. And I'm not even sure what that would be in the context of a customer.

I LOVE IT! And this is just the beginning. Long time ago I predicted the yelp for consumer, where company could refuse doing business with low-rated people, or implement differential pricing, or different T&C (no returns, etc..)

There are many customers from hell, and the good customers are paying the price. 80/20 rule rocks, any business could get rid of the 20% of customers that create 80% of problems and make greater profts with less revenue.

I get mediocre ratings from drivers when I take a shared ride and don't tip. Rating passengers poorly for not tipping is broken functionality, we really need self-driving cars and no drivers.

Historically I've always given drivers 5 stars, but now whenever I see my rating dip I one star all my recent rides since Uber won't tell me which driver did it. The less meaningful the broken rating system is the better.

This reminds me of Evan Miller's post on one of (but by no means the only) problem with star ratings: the numbers of ratings you have can skew the meaning hugely if Score = (Positive ratings) − (Negative ratings):

http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....

So do we have an API to get our five-star rating in HN and can we start doing "core wars" attacks on each other with up down voting?

In principle I agree; if I were to hypothetically verbally abuse my drivers, ought I not eventually be banned? If I walk into a local bar and am an asshole to the staff, eventually my photo will be put up next to the bouncer’s table on the “do not admit” list.

Unfortunately pretty much any system Uber is going to create here will be prone to some abuse, and subject to a lot of criticism.

5 star rating systems are utterly useless. There's no shared meaning in what the stars actually mean and, as anyone who has ever been on Ebay has known for decades, everyone ends up somewhere around 4.5 stars anyway.

Ratings should be computed based on a yes/no questions: Was the ride successful or not, with optional follow-ups for issues like safety, damage, cleanup, etc.

I hope that they don't start sharing user scores to other unrelated apps like a credit score or ChexSystem risk score but for apps.

Why is there a rider rating at all? If I'm paying someone to drive me somewhere I don't care if they don't like me.

for when you get drunk and barf in their car.

It's important for co-riders, in the case that you ever use pool. Co-riders won't be matched directly based on their ratings, but they'll be indirectly matched based on the algorithms that match riders to drivers based on rating.

I've sent a few friends home in Uber/Lyft and I'm always worried their behavior will represent me. I'm not friends with jerks, but sometimes my friends have had a little too much and need help getting home. I hope that we, as a society, care about others above ratings. There are always two sides to everything.

"Your social credit score is too low to use Uber. The nearest bus stop is 450m northwest. Have a nice day."

- deletes Uber

- installs Lyft

Wait, I did that a long time ago.

Uber is in for a surprise. You don't rate and block people who pay you. This idea is some AH PM having a brain fart inside Uber.

If I have the money I can pay anyone I like. Just a city wide car sharing startup with money to burn, I will hop on to it.

One lawsuit away to bare all, the algorithm about ratings.

I hope they start deactivating drivers who refuse service dogs or otherwise repeatedly fail to abide by the agreed terms of service. Uber continues to regularly ignore driver violations and fail to comply with the results of rider class action agreements.

If there is a warning system in place, maybe let you know why you might be getting low ratings, I don't see a problem with this.

If you're abusing a service and not following their general guidelines, they have every right to remove you.

How confident are we that, for example, you don't get rated lower in a given city of you're a member of the wrong ethnic group? Has anybody ever looked at these ratings (for drivers too, I guess) with an eye toward determining which biases exist?

Regardless, Uber should be able to detect those biases and hopefully correct for them. It wouldn't look too good if a discriminated group start getting kicked off

If Uber is providing a platform for independent contractors how can they ban people from using the platform at all? Shouldnt a user be able to accept a driver based on their score?

What is the path for redemption?

If you have a low rating, you become banned for life? Obviously if you have a low rating you will work to improve it, but if you are banned, how can you improve it?

I skimmed but is every comment in here trying to optimize how to implement a social credit system, rather than expressing terror at a social credit system?

Quit posting and get back to coding surveillance AIs, the sooner Uber will self-drive-arrest us to the Ministry of Love, while running over statistically fewer people (in terms of count * credit...).

Once Uber Eats takes over, and the whole world's food supply is now based on Social Credit Drones, if you say something like "I don't like women", you will die of starvation. This is the utopia you're all building.

Please stop with tech.

The alternative is that Uber eats will have a competitor like Lyft food and Lyft food will accept the customers that Uber eats won't. Uber eats will then notice that a large portion of their potential customers are using a competitor and will stop discrimination in order to increase profit

How long until someone correleates this with protected_class and finds this whole social rating system inherently problematic?

Will this cause riders kicked off to shift to Uber's competitors, say Lyft, thus poisoning those services for drivers?

If they start deactivating users with rating below average they will soon have very few users left.

The charter school debate just came to the privatization of "public" transportation.

Jokes on them, they were deactivated off my phone years ago.

Is there a way to view your passenger rating over time?

In Russia, driver rates you!

puh-lez. I was "deactivated as a rider" LONG before this system was in place.

My (probable) offense: asking support why I couldn't use a discount code from slickdeals.

This reminds me of a Black Mirror episode....

The overheated reactions in this thread are so bizarre. The only surprising thing is the implication that only now is it possible to get yourself banned from Uber for bad behavior as a passenger.

This headline confused me, because I thought this was already how Uber worked! I knew drivers had a firing threshold and passengers had ratings; given that drivers can't freely reject pickups, I don't understand what the point of rating passengers was prior to this.

Of course, it was definitely possible to get yourself banned for bad behavior before this, I've known people who were banned. It looks like the change here is allowing algorithmic bans based only on score. I can see why people object to that, although again I had always assumed it was the point of the scores.

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