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.
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.
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.
That guy probably deserved a "true" 5-star rating.
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.
It makes you a jerk, nothing more really.
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.
>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.
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.
EDIT: I mean the royal "you", not you specifically. Also, I have been the a'hole before :|
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.
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.
However, Uber doesn't value star-ratings the way she does, so she is wrong.