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.

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.

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.

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'm not the one firing anyone. If Uber makes the absurd decision to fire someone before they have a 4.2 rating, that is entirely on them.

If I tell you to sing the National Anthem all day and all night, or else I'll kill my neighbor, would you be at fault if you opt not to and and as a result I choose to kill my neighbor?

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.

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 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 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?

>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.

Probably just tell him to sort himself out.

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.

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.

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.