You'll rent a place that ends up being on the noisy highway and the worst rating you'll find is "great for early risers!"
The rating system does not work. Airbnb doesn't care about rating inflation because it just makes everything look like 5-star experience.
Uber is frustrating for other reasons. I've never made an Uber driver wait for me, I'll greet the driver, and I can't imagine how someone can be a better customer. I have a 4.1 rating and can't get VIP because of my rating. My girlfriend doesn't even believe in getting up to leave the house until the app tells her the Uber is there. She constantly calls uber for large loud drunk groups, redirects her rides, and yammers on her phone the whole ride. She has a 4.8+.
Aside, my girlfriend also rates all Uber drivers 3/5 because that's an average rating. They get a 4/5 if they go above and beyond. I actually though 5-star systems had merits until I met her. Now I'm firmly against them.
My girlfriend & I discovered large patches of mushrooms growing out of the master bedroom carpet in an otherwise very unhealthy AirBnB. I wanted to write feedback on the house, but I couldn't warn others since AirBnB's policy in such cases is to remove the listing. I spotted the listing not long after with a clean slate. I'm sure they cleaned the place, but I'm also sure they didn't tear out the floors and fix the root problem. Too bad no one will know since the ratings won't be a source of info in such cases.
Maybe AR will open a new door there... I know it would be an extremely hard problem to solve - it might involve cutting-edge techniques in AR, AI, computer vision and so on - but I think there might be a billion dollar market there.
The pain certainly exists as reviews could be useful, but they're trash almost everywhere (Uber, AirBnB, Google, Amazon, Deliveroo, etc.) due to platform-owner incentives.
Seems like you'd want to pair it with a browser extension (want to avoid making that booking in the first place), and the back-end engineering is very similar to what (IMO/AFAIK) you'd need to support similar reality overlays in "true" AR.
As for the business model of this independent platform, one could still make a ton of money out of it as long as its revenue-generating incentives were disaligned from the review scores, and I really think that's not such a hard problem to solve.
For the AR-ish part... Oh, widgets! Right? Like clock, or weather, or the news thing. Constantly (modulo performance) update what you're showing on the widget based on location. Or dynamic notifications; "this is how many reviewed locations we know of at this location".
I thought this is a non-issue because airbnb withholds reviews until both parties have written a review?
>or to avoiding seeming like a dick / hard customer. I suspect it's the latter -- there really is no upside to being an honest critic.
I personally don't understand this. If a place is legitimately bad, it's not being a "dick / hard customer", it's telling the truth. The upside is that you added slightly more information to the market.
This is really the bare minimum. I know a ton of drivers who care less about wait time than some other annoying tics their customers might have. I've lived in a region where the median rating seems to be around a 4.4. I've never met someone with a 4.1 uber rating.
I'm going to postulate that you're being VERY rude in a way you don't know. Maybe have someone ride with you and critique your behavior.
With driver ratings, I can see my driver's rating and they can see it too. The rating system in Lyft (not sure about Uber) also has buttons you can use to explain why you gave a bad rating or indicate what you liked about a driver, which presumably provides anonymous feedback to the driver on how they could improve their scores.
In comparison, a passenger with bad driver ratings gets no feedback or incentive to improve, and it's hard to know whether they could improve at all. If they have a bad rating from drivers they may never know and will just have a bad experience with the app, potentially forever. If you pick up a fare who already has a rating of 1.5/5, are you more likely to negatively interpret their behavior and give them a low score? Psychology is a factor here.
An anecdote: On my third ever ride with Uber, the driver told me I had a very, very low passenger score. That means one of my first drivers gave me a low rating, probably a 1 or 2. Why? I have no idea. He didn't know either. Maybe the driver was having a bad day or thought I was rude, or the driver had trouble finding my pick-up location. In the end the only outcome was that it took me longer to get a driver to pick me up afterward because drivers saw my low score. (I use Lyft now instead and have no problems)
If I get bad service or ripped off I want to be able to tell anyone and everyone "STAY AWAY!" but instead I know that if I do that no one will rent to me. Why would they? They can just make sure to choose only people that never post a bad review.
The only way to avoid this I can imagine is relying on cryptographic zero-knowledge proofs to defer ratings to an external network (ideally decentralized, but a neutral third-party ala TripAdvisor could work too). The platform gives the customer and provider a token when the transaction takes place, and they can use it to anonymously sign a review on the external ratings platform.
If I was a renter and wanted to disassociate from bad reviews, I imagine the easiest way to do it would be to transfer overship of the property to a holding company or similar. This is far harder to do and there’s far more cost.
getting a prepaid sim is a "high barrier"?