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.

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."

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

Just accept 2+2=5 and you won't have any issues!

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.

"problem users" doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means.

There are cities without Uber. But I can't think of a city that has no taxis and only has Uber...

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.

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.

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.

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

"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 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.

I abhor cabs.

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

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.

> - 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.

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.

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.

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.

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