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Uber To Ban Riders With Four-Star or Lower Ratings in Australia and New Zealand (bbc.co.uk)
Uber is to block customers in Australia and New Zealand from its ride service if they have a low passenger rating. Riders rated four-out-of-five stars or lower will be banned for six months. Ratings are based on feedback left by drivers after each journey. BBC: The move is aimed at improving passenger behaviour, the company said. Uber told the BBC that Australia and New Zealand had been identified as a place to bring in the rule after feedback from drivers. The same policy was introduced in Brazil earlier this this year, Uber said, but it's the first time the control has been rolled out in an English-speaking market. An Uber spokeswoman declined to be drawn on exactly how many of its 2.8 million users in Australia and New Zealand currently had ratings of below 4.0 -- but conceded it was only "a few thousand." The "vast majority" -- believed to be more than 90% -- had ratings of at least 4.5, the company said. The policy will kick in on 19 September and passengers will receive several warnings before they are banned.
now male uber drivers can threaten females with low stars if they won't kiss em.
I can't see how telling everyone this could result in any forms of bad behavior to harm legitimate riders. Not at all.
Also, how skewed is the rating system if anyone below 4 is considered bad. They need a new system if it's 5 stars or bust.
Shouldn't that be up to the passenger? Offer a discount for riding with annoying drivers. Just make sure it's not the default.
Table-ized A.I.
I didn't think it was possible for them to find a way for internet businesses to double down on how badly they've fucked up the star rating system, but here we are.
What ever happened to 3 (on a 1-5 scale) being a perfectly respectable average?
5 stars means exceptional. 4 stars mean exceeds expectations. 3 starts is meets expectations or average. Why are the star ratings being devalued in the last 3-4 years. Why does almost everyone I know gives 5 stars for meets expectation, when that is supposed to be 3. If you 5 star just meeting expectations how do you reward really exceptional when the most you can give is 5 stars?
Does this mean drivers will give low ratings to passengers if they don't tip?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
I wonder how quickly "ratings" will simply be an additional commodity sold with the ride ?
This opens up passengers to being blackmailed into giving additional money to the driver to ensure they maintain their rating.
your economy is well and truly farked.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Remember when 5 stars meant perfect and 4 stars meant good and 3 meant average and 2 means poor and 1 means unacceptable. Now 4 means poor for some reason? Because everyone on both sides is expected to rate the other side with nothing less than a perfect rating. Policies like this, where getting a 4/5 means kicking you off the service, only give everyone even more incentive to rate people and services with nothing worse than a perfect score. Give them a rating that is even 1 single point less then perfect risks getting them suspended or banned. That's just gross perversion of the whole point of a multi-tiered rating system.
WOW seems really bad and invasive. Since the Uber CEO just said during a business show interview that Uber is about ending car ownership.
;)
So you ban riders from using a service. While at the same time saying car ownership needs to be ended.
Uber is preparing for an IPO, the CEO is talking about new cultural norms, etc etc. Investors will be lining up for us.
This guy gives me the creeps.
Just my 2 cents
Uber for degenerates. A monthly fee for drivers and riders, but you get the fee waived if you've been banned from Uber or have felony convictions.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Could we please have these miscreants reported to the five eyes security agency and frog marched to Guantanamo immediately.
Anything to ease the economic anxiety of our imperialist overlords. Please help America.
Signed
Patriotic Aussie
... for Congress.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
It's a perfect recipe for gaming the ratings system with quid pro quo. Drivers are punished for ratings lower than 4.6, passengers are punished for ratings lower than 4. Both parties are now incentivised to give each other 5 star ratings, and both have leverage against each other to prevent lower ratings.
The only thing this can possibly accomplish is to further devalue the ratings system, itself. I guess it will make middle managers happy with the metrics to see that 100% of drivers fall within the top 10% of drivers, and 100% of passengers fall within the top 20% of passengers. Those are really great numbers.
Outright banning seems counter to Uber's twisted money-making schemes.
Just charge the low stars more and/or give them increased wait times. As their stars go down, these things increase. Then let drivers decide if they want to deal with anyone under 4*, and give them a pass if they don't.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I got guilt-tripped into giving a 5-star rating at my car dealership for some routine service. "If you give any less than 5 stars, or no rating at all, our management considers that a failure."
Or maybe I was blackmailed. "Give us a 5-star rating if you ever want your vehicle to pass inspection again."
The stupid part was I was very happy with the service that day... right up until the guilt trip. I gave him the 5 anyhow, its not that poor guy's fault the entire world is fucked.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
My plan to ruin Uber. Become an uber driver and give all my passengers 1 star ratings. Pretty soon Uber will have no passengers left with good enough scores to get a ride.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Do you have to provide some sort of identification? What's to stop me from downloading the app and making a new account under Billy Mays name and paying with a loaded cash card? Seems easy to abuse. Also what's to stop the drivers from rating a user poorly because they are black/woman/look gay? I'm half temped to become an uber driver, abuse the system and then accidentally being found out to destroy their reputation because they suck as a company.
It's a cab ride. It should be Good/Bad. What's the difference between a 5 star ride and a 4 star or a 5 and and 3? I've taken Ueber in 5 cities in 3 countries now, and I still don't know what's a 3 star ride and what's a 5 star ride.
Basically it should be "the guy tried to assault me" or "I got to where I wanted". What more do you really want from a cab ride? Is 3 stars supposed to be average, and 5 stars is you got a hot stock tip, and made ten grand? It's a useless, broken system is anything less than 4 stars means "the guy might assault you".
I'm waiting until someone complain about troll rating, and Uber will switch to thumbs up/thumbs down rating
that is one way to get rid of riders that don't tip
Since all Uber drivers are so wealthy, they could just offer ten dollars in exchange for a good rating.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
... where everything but forced-smiley happy-clappy mandatory obsessive delusional positivism gets you anything between "Don't be a negative nanny!" and fired from your job.
Not online though. There, all the bottled-up natural negativity and reasonability (also called "negativity" in the US) is explosively released.
They should be fixing real problems. For example at Heathrow airport in London, England I had an Uber that didn't show up. I could see that the driver was on the other side of the airport waiting while I was in the designated spot for being picked up. The driver hit me with a £10 charge. Another couple had the same thing happen to them while I was there. Got the money back eventually.
Now with extra stars!
First cold hard reality check is this will be used to harass young women, non-whites, and people with accents, all of which are banned by these countries' constitutions.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This will not dissuade bad passengers very much.
Presently the driver has to issue a rating immediately at the end of every trip. The passenger has days to do their rating.
Practically speaking, if the driver leaves a bad rating, the passenger is guaranteed to leave a 1 star .. tit for tat retaliation.
And yeah, the system is setup where anything less than 5 stars is a bad review for the driver. If his/her rating goes below 4.6, they get kicked off the platform.
When Uber kills off all the taxi companies by sheer volume, and then makes everybody behave (except Kalanick, I suppose) it's just good business, right?
...arrive unraped. Drivers will be given several warnings before they are banned.
https://xkcd.com/937/
Because of taxation and Uber's wage rates, a driver working for Uber makes less $/hour than does a normal taxi driver in Australia.
The main difference is that there are no requirements for entry to be an Uber driver other than a car, driver's license and phone with the app. Taxi drivers have higher requirements - including being registered and displaying their registration card inside the taxi.
And all of the complaints people used to make about taxi drivers are now made about Uber drivers - and worse. An Uber driver will stop "here" rather than in the best place or make illegal turns to pickup a passenger because "stars".
Seems this episode of Black Mirror, named "Nosedive" is coming true in little steps here and there. Is this really the world we want?
For the non-Netflix people, read about this dark future here: Nosedive
Customer was wearing a Justin Bieber shirt.
1 star.
Lol butthurt niglets always the same
No, we don't any form of ranking system which bans people from a service based on a highly subjective rating system otherwise we'll end up in the dystopia portrayed in Black Mirror's Nosedive episode.
I want to know what the others hated about the thing they graded.
Often times the fact a crank or an idiot hates something will tell you more than the glowing or factual but dry reviews.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." works both ways.
Granted... You can't really apply that to services, like Uber.
Nor should a simple 5-star system be used for something like that, where both providing and experiencing a service is utterly subjective.
The point of a grade system is to eliminate subjectivity and to present the quality of that which is graded in an objective fashion.
And you can't do that when people can give grades based on personal preferences and hangups.
There's a name for that. Prejudice.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If the max rating is expected for being acceptable, that pretty makes it impossible to distinguish acceptable from exceptional, doesn't it.
Will they be banning drivers which have similar customer ratings ? I use a regular Taxi myself in the SF east bay. Easier to get and I know how much it will cost me every time. I tried Uber a couple of times and they couldn't fit 3 in a car, or there wasn't a van available.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Fook uber drivers... They stop right in the middle of the road with no warning. They suck! Ban uber.
Another way to discriminate against people you may not like or who didn't tip enough or whatever it was that pushed your button that day. Wonderful.
Fortunately, I see no way this 'feature' could ever be abused or hacked or spoofed, especially with such a fine, upstanding company like Uber running the system.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
And how long do you think it will take Uber to realised that they just banned every single Abo in Australia and new Zealand who ever took an Uber?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
What's the point of having 1,2,3 stars in the rating in that case?
Sounds like they need to transition to a thumbs up/down scoring model.
An easy fix is to do what Airbnb does: don't release ratings until both sides have rated.
An easy fix is to do what Airbnb does: don't release ratings until both sides have rated.
Uber will never do that.
Uber uses the rating system, which is really just noise, as a plausible excuse for firing drivers. (Uber doesn't technically need a reason, but it plays better if there is one.) And the criteria is not simply that below 4.6 the driver is fired. Other secret factors are in that algorithm.
One of them is how long the driver has been with Uber. Uber does not want, in general, to retain drivers. Uber wants to fire them. The reason should be obvious: When you fire the driver, you go to your infinite pool of new drivers and replace him. So the old Ubered-out car, once a nice sedan, but now inevitably has become a nasty-ass taxicab. Because passengers are very very hard on cars, and these cars are driving hundreds of miles each day. Uber's marketing premise is that a nice new clean car -- not a nasty taxicab -- will come fetch you. So they need to churn the fleet. New driver = new car. (Not the model year; those are all in a certain range. We're talking about the wear and tear condition.)
Pax maliciously rate drivers ALL THE TIME. I won't even go into it, but for example, if the passenger is having a fight with her boyfriend, she will take it out on some hapless Uber driver. Many many things like that. I've seen it. I have driven about 3,500 rides.
Honest and reasonable ratings are very rare, so much so as to be lost to noise. Or if you think about what is really being measured, the honest ratings are the noise!
I don't think drivers can see how an individual passenger rated them, or passengers see how an individual driver rated them.
I think the rating system should be a lot simpler.
- If the driver picked you up at the appointed place, and got you where you needed to be without being an annoyance or breaking every road rule known, didn't kill you (or assault you), and didn't obviously lengthen the journey to extract more money out of you. Good.
- Similarly, if your passenger was there on time, didn't leave a mess in the car, and wasn't annoying and didn't assault / kill you. Good.
- Anything else should be various shades of bad, with killing drivers / passengers obviously being the worst.
This way, the ratings systems would be a lot easier to understand and use. As many point out, I am not sure what a 4 star rating is. To me, that is more than acceptable, and 5 stars suggests something exceptional.
If a driver / passenger has gone above and beyond simply, then there ought to be a more generic feedback form where you take you can express your gratitude or whatever.
I guess the uber/lyft ratings shown in the Sequalizer by Denzel Washington were accurate then: broke a guys hand, got a 5 star rating so he didn't break the other hand.
How is the rating influenced by tipping behavior ?
Wouldn't uber drivers rate tipping riders higher, which has nothing to do with safety or other factors ?
"Most of the Americans who react like this are just tired."
"They're tired of every positive aspect of America being downplayed..."
"After all, you spitefully demanded this."
Wow, projection much?
No, this is a result of ignorant Americans (not all Americans, just the ignorant ones), paying excessive attention to America's enemies and ignoring (or crapping on) America's friends. Why do you do that?
Also, you elected one such to the White House recently. Why do you do that?
Any realistic assessment of your statements would result in the following. Your comments are the result of a proud ignorance. You've spent years ignoring the world and only pay attention to America, and even that you do a bad job of. You are nursing a chip on your shoulder the size of France (look it up) and have conjured up imagined slights at every turn. Slights like:
- Christians are a persecuted minority, in dire threat!
- white people are a persecuted minority, in dire threat!
I could go on, but really you are just a disgruntled A-Hole. You are nursing a grudge and your attitude is on display for all. Congratulations, Dumb-Ass!
I wonder what will happen when they discover that a "disproportionate" share of riders with bad ratings are "people of color."
Hard to say really. Personally all a driver has to do to get 5 stars from me is drive me from A to B without incident. I've given drivers low ratings for unsafe driving or if their cars really smell but that's about it. Oh and the occasional drivers who have a hard time applying consistent pressure to the gas pedal for some reason so are constantly speeding up and slowing down. Gives me brutal motion sickness.
I would hope drivers are doing the same thing. Considering the nature of the service I would think the only way to get less than 5 would be to do something overtly negative so I guess people who are getting lower ratings must be doing something to vex the driver.
Hopefully the warnings give some indication of what they're doing wrong. You need to tell them SOMETHING about what they've been doing to get low ratings or how will they change.
Also speaking as a Kiwi, we have some really shitty binge drinking culture. I'm sure there are some drunk idiots who could do with a wake-up call.
I feel like that if the passenger or driver were killed that would preempt any ability to leave a 1 star rating.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
That's pretty funny coming from a 1-star company.