[Totoradio]

I think the article is more about the fact that 5* covers every experience from "slightly below average but not enough that I want to crush my driver livelihood" to "This was the better ride of my life, bar none" and everything in between.

Doing so, it's mostly useful to employers and not to users. The only case where it's useful to both is the case you describe, the obvious 1* ratings.

[cpkpad]

To be fair, the system works pretty well on the whole. One of the reasons I switch to Uber/Lyft because of the extreme attention on customer service. Drivers are very motivated to keep customers happy. That's a big difference to cab rides.

I've had many one-star cab rides (joy ride several times as long, verbally abusive, etc.). I've only had one bad experience on a Lyft/Uber. But the quality of the typical experience is much higher too.

It's imperfect, but I think the problem is more with:

* unreasonable performance thresholds; * misuse of statistical significance; * use of data in isolation; and * misuse of data

The other issues described mostly wash out after a few hundred rides. On the other hand, automatically firing people who fall below 4.6 stars without so much as a conversation is a little bit insane. On the other hand, many human managers do things which are insane too; nothing's perfect.

On the whole, eBay has been pretty reliable for me due to ratings, but I did get cheated twice because of similar misuse.

In one case, I ordered a premium item for about 50 bucks. They sent a low-end item which costs about 10 bucks. It wasn't obvious; for the most part, people wouldn't realize it until months later. Most ratings were high, with maybe 1 in 100 people pointing out the item was not as advertised.

eBay wasn't concerned. Credit card required an expert appraisal. Federal trade commission doesn't deal with this sort of thing. Seller appeared to be raking in about $500k per year profit on fraud. After no one cared, I decided to follow eBay's, credit card's, and FTC's lead, and say that for $50, it wasn't worth my time either.

But I stopped shopping for anything which could be forged on eBay (chemicals, fabrics, materials, jewelry, SD cards, etc.).

If eBay combined normal mechanisms with ratings, it'd be pretty easy to stay reliable. Alibaba does this -- there's a real conflict resolution process.

[arbie]

eBay almost always sides with the buyer when a claim is filed.

[oever]

Rating every single ride on a transportation service is nuts. It's a burden on the client to have the feeling that he needs to rate and it's a stress on the driver.

If there's something wrong with the ride, like tardiness, inefficiency, bad vehicle or filth you should be able to report that explicitly. That way the driver can learn and improve. When the complaints exceed a threshold, there's a consequence.

The popularity contest with the stars is meaningless and stressful.

[Finnucane]

When you go to a restaurant, most of the time you probably leave a normal-size tip, unless something has gone terribly wrong during your visit. On ebay, a seller with a rating of less than 95-96% is probably not trustworthy. Most of the time we're not really grading, it's more of a pass/fail system--either things went more or less as expected, or it was bad.