[icanhackit]

there are plenty of poor people that are at least as aloof, entitled and rude to service staff as rich people

We need a reverse Yelp that reviews humans rather than businesses. So many people fail to follow the Golden Rule in simple, everyday interactions for no discernible advantage to themselves at the cost of dignity, respect and efficiency.

Some customers you don't want. And the customer is not always right. A sort of trade embargo in response to poor behavior would be interesting.

[quesera]

> We need a reverse Yelp that reviews humans rather than businesses.

I'd like that for drivers. My vehicle should be aware of the vehicles nearby and the likely drivers thereof, and present me with a HUD showing the poorly-reviewed in red.

[wpietri]

I have often imagined a dashcam that does license plate recognition and lets you know when shitty drivers are nearby. And of course, it would have voice response so you could give nearby cars compliments and public grumbles. Presumably you'd also want it to be geosensitive and real time, so that it could say, "Hey, there's a lunatic coming up behind you."

Seems like it would be easy to put together a dash stand, some OpenCV magic, and a little glue logic to get a prototype together.

[msie]

No no no! Hopefully you guys are joking. This is another case of geeks thinking technology and public shaming will cure us all of bad human behaviour. Cynically I think you'll get funding.

[rwallace]

Actually that's a bloody brilliant idea. In an ideal world, morality or enlightened self-interest would convince everyone to behave well. The real world falls far short of that ideal, but social pressure is often a powerful tool for filling in the gaps. You'd think "you might die" would deter drunk drivers, but it didn't. "Everyone will think you're an asshole" was more effective. Let's extend that to other forms of misbehaviour on the road. The point here isn't the technology. It's using the technology to save lives.

[wpietri]

Our current version of this in the US is a system where there are a much smaller number of observers (cops). Too many bad observations and you face license suspensions.

In practice, the small number of observers means that there are plenty of bad drivers who have long periods of bad behavior with no negative feedback. Basically all I'm suggesting here is increasing frequency of observation while reducing the size of the penalty from "large ticket" to "mild shame".

It's also approximately equivalent to what happens in a small community. There if you are a bad driver, word will get around and eventually get back to you. That doesn't seem like a terrible dynamic to me.

[hueving]

It worked with Uber rating drivers and riders. Care to elaborate on why this wouldn't work?

[bmelton]

A big, obvious concern would be having a system that alerted you to drivers previously seen exhibiting bad behavior, and the social justice network taking that as an opportunity to avenge the bad behavior and inadvertently causing danger to themselves, their "adversaries" or other drivers on the road.

On top of that, everybody drives poorly at some point, and for some reason. A roommate of mine wrecked his car once like, one block from our house. I couldn't stop laughing at him long enough for him to explain that while he was driving, a spider was crawling out of his ear, and it justifiably freaked him out enough to hit a telephone pole.

If I was a random passerby that didn't get to stick around for the explanation, I would have flagged him as a clear danger to other motorists, which would have been undeserved. To boot, I think he reacted as well as he could have, and probably better than most, given the circumstance.

[wpietri]

Isn't this roughly equivalent to the concern that sometimes people give unfairly bad reviews on Yelp? Sure, it happens, but it seems like the solution isn't less data, but more. If you have 100 or 1000 data points on every driver, then it seems like it would be pretty easy to extract the people who are actually problematic versus just normal drivers.

[detaro]

Wasn't there a "report my driving for everybody" or something along those lines on HN in the past few days?

[bcook]

You two have my support.

A psychiatrist acquaintance told me some people almost reflexively lose control and must take advantage of a chance to belittle someone in a customer/server scenario.

[waterlesscloud]

Autonomous cars will almost certainly do this in that transitional period before all cars are automated.

I bet they'll even do it after, at least between manufacturers.

[natrius]

I think this reverse Yelp you describe is coming soon, partially because I plan on helping to build it. A "trade embargo" can be an effective punishment of last resort for any sort of bad behavior, from crime to a failure to contribute to a particular public good. You could use it to take collective action where the state won't, or maybe eventually to replace the state without needing to use force.

You could store people's cryptographic identities and reputations on a global computer than anyone can access, but with rules that no one can break. That now exists, and it's called Ethereum.

An embargo is a pretty harsh punishment, though. In practice, you'd probably only use it when someone fails to provide some lesser form of restitution.

[geofft]

I can totally see why you want that, but a cross-business blacklist on consumers sounds absurdly dystopian.

(Maybe this means normal-Yelp is dystopian, and maybe I should have more empathy with small businesses complaining about unfair reviews.)

[tene]

I've considered this several times before, with similar concerns. The solution that seems like it would mitigate these problems is to have contextual social ratings, rather than global ratings. If I indicate the people that I trust, and transitively trust, then I can see indications of misbehaviour from my social network, rather than "some abusive asshole is rating people poorly for not indulging him enough".

Unfortunately, this reminds me of PGP's web of trust, and that never really took off. It may be that it failed entirely due to other issues (pgp's terrible UI, encryption is hard and nobody cares), but it's not a great sign.

[geofft]

Someone (Airbnb?) was trying to use Facebook login as a similar web of trust, as a proxy for real-world social pressure to be a reasonable human being. I don't think PGP really says anything here, positive or negative, when we have Facebook, which is far far bigger and much more tuned to actual, ongoing social connections.

(and this coming from someone with a key in the strong set, and no Facebook account)

[mst]

Many metropolitan areas in .uk have a shared blacklist used by a group of bars - get thrown out of one permanently, don't try and join any of the others.

I've encountered a number of people sanctioned by that system who still believe in it overall.

[otoburb]

>Some customers you don't want.

An Uber driver told me that customers are rated for exactly this reason. If a customer score is deemed too low when requesting a ride, then Uber drivers will tend to be a tad slower to accept the ride in the hopes another driver will pick it up instead.