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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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