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Comment by pud | Hacker News Reader

> below 4.7 and you go on probation

This brings up a related point. For a typical Uber ride, do you give the driver 3-stars or 5-stars?

I usually give 5-stars when a ride goes smoothly. But I know people who default to 3-stars (average) unless the driver goes out of his way & is exceptional.

I've considered switching my default to 4-stars for a nice ride, leaving me a 1-star buffer for exceptional service. But using that scale, I wouldn't want a 4.7 driver to get dinged.

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You know people use 3-star average for Uber? That surprises me.

One of my earlier Uber rides I decided to go ahead and rate 3 stars because I felt it was a fairly average ride. Pretty quickly I got contacted by someone at Uber who wanted to ask me what was wrong with my ride. When I explained that I felt it was merely average, they told me a simplistic version of what jamiequint said, that they only want to work with the best drivers and therefore 3 isn't an average rating, it's actually a bad rating.

Dear lord, that's a bad rating system. They should just replace the stars with words. "Average" means average, "Outstanding" means outstanding, etc.

Indeed. Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1098/

Doesn't it mostly matter that the aggregate ratings for each driver will rank them relative to their peers? Thus the threshold for which drivers are let go is arbitrary and only really correlates with the demand Uber has for drivers. In other words, over time the highest rated drivers will remain employed, the worst won't.

Then they shouldn't use ambiguous stars for a rating system.

I think they should just make reviews less than 3 stars require a text explanation.

This. We've implemented this on a number of social networks fit reporting nefarious users. Scammers, spammers, etc. to help the community. We found that if a user can report a user with an easy click we were flooded with false positives. Users reporting one another for petty reasons like not replying to messages. The women would report other women seemingly out of spite. We later added an input box that requires a short explanation. The reporting abuse dropped through the floor, and the quality of the feedback from users is far better.

Requiring a short explanation will def put the average rating to 4.

They do. I had a driver who took me on the most roundabout way possible to get to my office. I rated him one star. It popped up a text field entry, I said what happened and Uber credited me the difference.

Agreed, they should have a colored scale from:

red -- poor -- 0%

yellow -- ok -- 5%

green -- fine -- 10%

blue -- great -- 15%

gold -- superb -- 20%

Attach a tip % to each (perhaps)

That would incentivize riders to rate their drivers lower.

Then don't attach tips, though maybe this would allow for more accurate reviews? I always give 5 stars, because its easy and all rides have been great.

Only one driver though, provided me with water bottles and candy. That was a superb experience. Maybe the only superb one while the rest were fine.

Really? The "upper-class" people who use Uber (people who are using their expensive smart phones to order the cab, people like ourselves) are averse to tipping well when the service is great? That's disgraceful.

You make it sound like a 5-star rating system is a novel thing, but it's used all over the Internet, and I think most people have a pretty reasonable understanding of the system.

Yes, and they understand 3 stars is a decent review.

I don't think so. I certainly interpret 3 stars on Yelp or Amazon as below average.

I think it is cultural, so not clear there is a real "understanding".

If they are telling riders this, then everyone will end up giving drivers a 5 unless they had a bad experience. This artificially inflates every score such that a 5 score ends lumping in the exceptional drivers with the slightly above average.

Youtube did a pretty interesting article on how they were switching to a thumbs system (like or dislike) after using stars for years and finding people either used 1 or 5. Found it, not as interesting as I recall: http://youtube-global.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/five-stars-domi...

"I felt it was a fairly average ride."

I'm not a uber user (have no need for it). Could you detail what factors to you makes a ride "average" or "good" or "great" etc?

It's all subjective, so it's hard to detail, but a good Uber ride is a far more enjoyable experience than, say, a taxi ride. The driver is courteous and knowledgable, receptive to conversation if I desire it, and quiet if not. The car is in good condition, with plenty of room, typically with some bottled water available if I'm thirsty. Shows up quickly, easy to find. Driver knows how to get where I want and gets me there in a reasonable amount of time. Etc. etc.

Except for the water, isn't that exactly what you'd expect from a taxi?

Have you ever been in a taxi? The above is what I expect from Uber. I only hope to make it to my destination alive in the average taxi.

Therein lies the problem with 5-star ratings. It's entirely subjective. There's no standard as to what makes an experience a 4-star one instead of a 2-star one. Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/937/

Personally, I think the "thumbs-up/thumbs-down" system does a better job.

Is it an American phenomenon? In Europe I expect a taxi driver to be quick to turn up, helpful and knowledgeable about the destination. Granted, I don't expect water.

Do you expect tons of leg room, with good-quality posh seats, driver not using a cellphone, no radio playing (unless desired), etc?

Well, I don't expect enormous leg room and posh seats, just to be comfortable (and clean). It may depend also what you define by those. Very often the car is a Mercedes so I'm rather fine with that. I actually prefer radio on, but never had the trouble to have it turned down or off when I wanted to call someone or chat with the driver.

Including the water, it's what you get from any livery service in Manhattan. I've only been out the bay a few times, but most car services I called were exactly as described here.

I hope they aren't comparing ratings directly for exactly this reason. They should be using something like z-scores where you measure every rating in standard deviation from the mean for that rater.

If they want to use a star system, this is the way to go.

Telstra (Australian Telco) internally uses a number rating for B2B sales and sales-support teams, and point inflation has made it useless. The Sales guys end up needing to explain to the customers what the numbers really mean; 8/10 was being left for "great service", but that qualified as a failure by the internal metrics.

(To make it even worse, the management accidentally let the sales meet their target once; some people actually got their bonuses, so upstairs bumped the minimum target score again.)

> But I know people who default to 3-stars (average)

You'd think they would be normalizing that data against that users average ratings, rather than as a raw score.

For eg. is this rating plus or minus this users average rating.

Similar to Amazon, we get people who give a 3/5 and write "good" or similar as a comment. Amazon treats 3 or below as a negative.

I've never given less than 5 stars. Every ride I have had with Uber has been perfect - aside from the cost :)

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