This is a repeating pattern we need to address on a meta-level to avoid an outcome that I think none of us think is optimal.
- private company innovates a service that people use all the time
- private company is so successful it displaces other, existing, methods of doing the same
- private company becomes defacto monopoly in many cases
- private company withdraws service from problem users
- those users are left with no options
In the case of Uber, it is kind of obvious, as there are areas where they have displaced (put out if business) numerous private cab and car service companies.
Each step is a reasonable progression through our system. I don’t think anyone should be blamed for each step.
The 5 star rating system being used reminds me a lot of eBay's feedback system. eBay's system has changed quite a lot over the years, and much could be said about each change they made, but specifically the 5 star system and the bar they set was always problematic because of the disconnect between what buyers thought a fair rating was vs what eBay considered fair.
In eBay land, anything less than 5 stars is unacceptable, but for most normal people if you asked them they might say 3 stars is fair for a perfectly acceptable experience. If you get too many 3 star ratings from happy satisfied customers your average might drop from 4.9 to 4.7 and suddenly you're on thin ice and at risk of having your account closed.
Looking at this article it appears Uber is using a similar system. They require an average rating of 4.6-- meaning every 4 star review you get is actually a ding against you-- even though those 4 star reviews might've been perfectly happy riders who just felt in their minds that 4 = Good, 5 = Outstanding or something.
eBay is a great example of a feedback system with different expectations than a naive user might assume.
I used it mostly when you had positive, neutral, and negative. One might think that taking a few extra days to ship something or an item not being in quite as pristine condition as advertised was probably a good candidate for a neutral. Not bad/not perfect.
But that wasn't really the expectation. Neutral was more like "It took me two weeks of emailing but I finally heard back from the seller and they shipped the item which really wasn't as described but I just wanted the transaction done at that point" Negative was "They shipped me a box full of bricks and made me pay the postage."
Taxis already discriminated against users they perceived to be problems. In New York, if you were a minority or headed somewhere outside Manhattan on the airports, good luck finding a cab.
I don’t believe that Uber and Lyft have made the problem significantly worse than it already was.
There is a big difference between individual taxi drivers refusing to take a specific fare at a specific moment in time and a company that controls a large percentage of ground transportation denying someone access to it forever.
It's like the difference between an injury and a chronic disease.
No, I think they should be fired and not allowed to work in public transportation for some time, and only then after some rehab/training. People can change, after all. But this is a different issue with different sorts of solutions.
It is really more like having one cashier at a grocery store refuse to ring you up as opposed to the grocery store chain not allowing you inside because the cashiers decided you weren't delightful enough, even if that was because your child was loud a few times.
When it is the cashier, you have a bit of recourse, after all. When it is the chain, you have very little recourse and not only that, but now you have to figure out where else to shop. It might not be so bad in a town with many grocery stores, but it'll be mighty inconvenient if you have to drive to the next town to shop.
Strikes me as something that may violate “failure to haul” laws in many municipalities. While there are a lot of egregious, openly racist, refusals by (e.g, NYC) cabbies to pick up black or Latino riders, chasing down individual cabbies means that local commissions rarely show their teeth on that issue. But going after a giant centralized concern, especially one now answerable to shareholders, is a different story.
This has been a particular problem for the handicapped community as I understand it, as the service speed for handicapped vehicles has been much worse.
Not just that, but when I was on crutches my rating dramatically dropped. I almost always had a friend with me to help out with storing the crutches and getting in and out of the car, but regardless my rating fell at least a tenth. Drivers probably didn’t like how I needed to grab onto their car to enter and exit, or maybe that the crutches were in their car, or that the whole process took a bit longer.
“Jerks” can be “people who are disabled and require more time getting in and out of the car”. Being on crutches, for instance, will cause your rating to fall. (At least that was my experience while in Boston)
Well the good thing about a marketplace is that when you act poorly at one business, you can still visit another one.
Uber isn't and shouldn't be the only option available to people. The laws that force every company to offer everything to everyone without question are almost always the markets with only one option.
All you're left with is a pseudo-market that offers few of the benefits of real private or public markets. A pretend public service with even less accountability and fewer people profiting from the industry.
> Well the good thing about a marketplace is that when you act poorly at one business, you can still visit another one.
We’re quickly heading to an Uber/Lyft duopoly. And they use similar ratings systems. Soooooo, I’m not sure what your point is. This isn’t a market, it’s a VC funded takeover of transportation.
Drivers have no way of knowing if someone will tip/review before they are prompted for a rating. Drivers rate riders immediately after the ride finishes.
So, yes, they don't base it off the actual review (that may be a service other than Uber that I'm recalling), but they'll often base your review off the review they expect you to give them.
Successful, long-time drivers do not waste there time with this pettiness. Nor do they waste time talking to reporters about insignificant issues like this when that time could be better spent actually making money. I've been driving on and off for 5 years now and all us veterans on the Facebook groups laugh at how silly all the constant nitpicking is.
As with any rating system, there will be outlying bad raters. That's why it is normal for absolutely no one to have a perfect 5 star. It's really not a bid deal.
You’re creating a bit of a “No true Scotsman” fallacy. “No ‘veteran’ driver would rate someone based on tips or their expected rating.”
Yet people are being rated on their tips. People are being rated based on their expected ratings of the driver, regardless of their “success” as a driver.
It’s a big deal because it locks someone out of a system that has forced out its competition (illegally in some cases; such as in London).
I'm not arguing against the idea that low-star riders make drivers' experiences worse and that's why they have low ratings. I'm arguing against the idea that a "social metric", which can be changed and expanded (to include, hypothetically, your credit score), should be used to deny access to services, without strong guarantees about the sources and other aspects of that social metric.
The Orwellian aspect is when companies start sharing their scores, and when those scores start having clearly highly subjective influences.
I had a very similar reaction 25ish years ago when I found out as a teen credit agencies exist and were somehow not illegal (but employment blacklists are).
Don't worry - I was told they are optional, and you only need them for major things like if you getting a new car or house financed. Anyone worried about these things were mocked with the slippery slope "fallacy" typically being the counterargument.
Of course scope creep inevitably happened - and now you are effectively locked out of many parts of society if you have a poor credit score. We were told it was outright illegal to use credit scores when hiring people (again, 25 years ago) so our fears were unjustified.
Now we're running credit reports on entry level warehouse positions, some volunteer jobs, etc. With every reason to believe it's going to get more pervasive.
As these "social rating" systems get more normalized with consumers, I fully expect to see "novel" new uses and data sharing starting to happen.
After watching some videos of what Uber drivers have to put up with, as well as having a few friends that work in retail, some kind of "social metric" may not be the worst thing.
As a society, we put up with a lot of terrible behavior and people get away with it because they don't care about making a scene or situation that is uncomfortable for everyone else. We pay higher prices to deal with these people's behavior: constantly complaining until they get free stuff, abusing return policies, review blackmail, vandalizing state/national parks, cutting lines, etc.
You're right though that we need very strong guarantees around the sources and accuracy of such a metric.
Who gets to decide who counts as a jerk? You? Think of somebody who's a jerk. Would you want that person at Uber deciding whether you should get a ride?
This question of "who decides?" is essential. I see snarky response after snarky response that ignores how power and authority corrupt decision-making.
I hope we can all agree that the decision to bar someone from participating in important ways in society should not rest on the unsupervised whims of people in Bay Area meeting rooms.
It’s pretty obvious who decides who is the jerk, the drivers. If you have an average of like 1 Star, is every single driver you’ve ever ridden with wrong? I think this is fine, they’re not drawing an arbitrary line, they’re saying wow if this person has made drivers rate him this badly then they shouldn’t be using the service. This seems entirely reasonable to me - I’ve ridden with some real assholes and don’t take Pool anymore as a result.
“Jerk” could mean anything though. “Jerk” could be girls that don’t flirt back. Or mothers with small children. Or disabled people needing more time getting in and out of the car.
Are you aware of any anecdotes of people saying their rating fell when they didn't flirt back or got on crutches or something? (Your point is still valid even if you don't, I'm just interested)
The big one no one is talking about are non-tippers.
It's becoming downright common for Uber drivers to outright admit they give 1 star ratings for non-cash-tippers.
But yes, I've anecdotally heard of ratings drop for women who typically are type-A chatty, but changed to quiet and withdrawn for a few weeks during major life events. Perhaps that came across as more surely, but just something as silly as someone perceiving a bad attitude from a rider can results in a lower rating score.
I've also talked to drivers who give poor ratings if they have to go well out of their way, and it ends up being a short ride. Sure, this really sucks for the driver - but is it the rider's fault at all? Other unpopular destinations get similar treatment (or so I've heard).
Just one driver? Just ten? Who decides what the threshold should be? And what happens when Uber and Lyft decide to ban riders for criteria other than their star rating? Other tech companies have begun to ban people for reasons having nothing to do with their behavior online.
If they use their momentary advantage to push out other legitimate options for transit, then there is a good argument for regulation protecting riders.
Maybe Uber shouldn't be making any decisions about users. Just present the rating to the driver pool and let drivers decide who they pick up and who they do not. It doesn't entirely solve the issue of "what is a justifiable reason for rating a rider (or driver) poorly?" but it makes it less catastrophic for users.
private company becomes defacto monopoly in many cases - private company withdraws service from problem users - those users are left with no options
However, the pattern as it often plays out in the late 20th and early 21st century has a wrinkle: Private company lets competitors occupy distant 2nd and 3rd positions in order to deflect charges of monopoly. The dominant company might even buy stock in the distant competitors to help keep them afloat.
But the final result is beyond Orwellian.
In 2019, if someone gets banned from Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, is there a viable mainstream alternative?
The local bus service in my city between the Bay Area and Sacramento reduced frequency and coverage last year. Their suggestion was to just use a ride-sharing app. It's not just cab companies.
I agree with this in general but how does this relate to the article? Uber removing bad riders from the app is clearly a move to protect the drivers. I disagree with the sentiment that this is somehow unethical.
I remember all the articles / suggestion that public transit contract with Uber to fill gaps in public transit, or even just to establish it in some areas. That seemed like a horrible idea to contract with a company whose entire existence has been bleeding money....
I got a lot of crap online when raising questions about such ideas from folks I think of as technology fans who really embrace all the disruption and all these convenient things these companies promise etc. Fortunately I see less of that these days.
I struggle to see how anything you described could be categorized as "Orwellian"... Why are we concerned about "problem users" being left with no options? Just act like a normal human and you won't be a problem user... What is "Orwellian" about free markets and voluntary exchange?
The beautiful thing about this comment is that the sentence "Just act like a normal human and you won't be a problem user." would have fit _perfectly_ in 1984.
If the government were mandating people behave a certain way, that would be an entirely different discussion. We're talking about a service that people can choose to use or not use. If they want to use it, they have to comply with the standards set by the service provider...
"Yeah, I mean jeez, what is it with people who can't, like, walk right and stuff? What's even their whole deal? They should just act normal and then it wouldn't be a problem any more!"
I'm not going to make any comparisons to novels or anything. I'm just going to tell you you're acting like an asshole, and you should think about not doing that.
It's "Orwellian" because people are being judged "problem users" without due process. There's no jury of peers, no possibility of appeal, just an opaque judgment from a private company concerned only with their own profit. If a company becomes a de facto monopoly then they are de facto part of the government, and should be held to government standards.
In the US, at least, they don’t have to be a monopoly to be held to non-discrimination standards. And unless there’s a huge investment in “Uber due process”, this is one-click cloud-powered discrimination.
This hasn’t happened at all with Uber? Taxis are still a thing, transit hasn’t been shut down because of Uber. Revenues might be down, yes, but Uber is not remotely approaching a monopoly.
Well, it is not necessarily right if you have 500 users, but I would call it dictatorial rather than orwellian. And it could certainly be a benevolent dictatorship with the right dictator.
The problem with the 1,000,000 users is it becomes harder and harder to have informed people make reasoned decisions based on good information, so you end up relying on processes and proxies. Data and reports. And then you create rules like "whenever data point X reaches threshold Y action Z will be taken". And it is a good rule. Not a perfect rule, because perfect rules are really really hard. And maybe the rule can be gamed a bit. Griefed a bit. And this makes people unhappy and they start complaining, but there are so many of them and they were the ones breaking the rules anyway, and there really isn't time to look into all these complaints, and its impossible to figure out exactly what happened without reading through terabytes of logs so the rules are the rules and people just need to follow them. And so what if they just got a life ban because of a momentary lapse of reason or because an organized group filed a series of false complaints. Life is too short to coddle whiners and toxic people.
[edit] warning: you might find this comment irrelevant, annoying or even false
You forgot the juiciest parts:
- private company plays on legal gray areas on purpose
- private company invest aggressively to expand faster than law can react in order to grab said monopoly
This is basically capital cancer, they had a real value but dismissed everything a company is to a society:
- stable for employees
- stable for users
- stable for society
Any company can play rough when let loose with massive funds, but when reality occurs, just like anybody else, they'll have to round their corners and .. surprise.. they stop being interested and competitive.
No, they weren't. Taxi companies operated legally. Uber routinely broke the law.
Also it still perplexes me that Uber managed to convince so many people with their bullshit PR campaign about the small upstart facing the Taxi Mafia - when from the beginning it was a heavily-funded company, later turned multinational corporation, fighting small local providers with underhand tactics.
I'm not trying to excuse Uber but taxi companies in some places also routinely broke the law by refusing to travel to certain areas, pick up some minority passengers, or accept credit cards. In theory they were accountable to local taxi commissions but in practice that was totally ineffective in forcing drivers to obey the law.
It still perplexes me that people believe that Uber needed to convince anyone about Taxi mafia. The taxis in US are amazingly backwards -- for example, there were no online tracking, no pre-defined fares, and no online ordering.
I remember having to use "car services" just because the taxis were so unpleasant.
It actually wasn't Uber + Lyft (or their class better UXs) that convinced me. It was a taxi cab driver turned Uber + Lyft driver who looked at me incredulously when I asked him if Uber/Lyft was worth it.
"You bet ya!", he said, "I'm on vacation!" he said. He went on to talk about how the taxi cab industry was a dirty industry and uber/lyft reformed it.
Meanwhile one of my journalist friends declaims the "tyranny" of Uber/Lyft. It's not hyperbole its simply inaccurate.
It sounds like you've never been stranded late at night waiting hours for a cab that was "5 minutes away." I don't participate in the bar scene anymore. I don't benefit from the increased user experience of knowing exactly where your cab is, and if they cancel. Legal or not, I sure am glad those jackasses got their comeuppance.
Taxi companies provided a horrible customer experience, routinely discriminated, and often defrauded their customers. I know because I suffered from it long before Uber ever existed.
And, in addition, in many places taxi companies became a cartel: remember the TLC medallion madness where some crooks were reaping the cream of the crop.
> No, they weren't. Taxi companies operated legally. Uber routinely broke the law.
No, they didn't. At least, not in most US cities - I don't know how the laws work abroad. All a taxi medallion does is allow you to accept rides from people that hail you from the street. That's it. Limo companies and vans that you scheduled beforehand did not need medallions. There's functionally not much different from the service Uber provides and existing charter services, except for the fact that Uber used technology to make scheduling rides much faster.
The "Taxi Mafia" very much existed, though calling it a cartel is probably more accurate. Governments deliberately constrained the supply of taxis through medallions. Naturally, this resulted in inflated prices and poor service due to lack of competition. There's a reason why many people have little sympathy for the taxi industry's struggles to compete with ride sharing: taxis sucked.
I took a cab from the las vegas airport to my hotel recently as I was in a hurry and didn't know where the uber pick up area was. When we got to the hotel, suprise suprise, the credit card machine was broken and it took a 15 minute call for the driver to get things sorted and charge the card manually via calling his dispatcher.
Taxi had a lot of substandard features. But their employees weren't random guys without insurance nor training. They also had some semblance of career. I don't know all, but many Uber drivers didn't get their investment back yet and changing prices and rules make it a risky bet.
Even in the USA, that wasn’t true, let alone outside of the states. Taxi drivers don’t make back their investment (car/medallion rental) often, much more than an Uber driver who can use their own car and need no medallion at all. And...career as a taxi driver? There is a reason driving a cab is on the low wrung of new immigrant jobs, you can barely survive on it.
I guess they did have insurance (again, at least in the states), but so do Uber drivers.
Maybe 30 years ago that was true? Definitely not today, well, for some definition of raise a family I guess. If you are doing it to support your family back in Nigeria, it could work out.
I agree Uber's not a monopoly, but I also think crappy taxi companies are a local problem.
I don't use Uber or taxis often, but have used both several times over the years. There's never been a practical difference for me. If anything, Uber is less convenient because I need to sign up and install an app. Maybe one was a little cheaper, but not so much that I noticed.
> This is basically capital cancer, they had a real value but dismissed everything a company is to a society:
> - stable for employees
> - stable for users
> - stable for society
No. Stability comes at the expense of dynamism. Innovation disrupts stability, and society is more often than not better off for it. You pay a needless tax whenever you buy a CD or flash drive which gets handed off to record companies in the presumption that you will pirate music. Politicians decided that the music industry needed more stability, and passed laws to make consumers fork over tax money to subsidize them.
There was a push to make ride-share companies wait at least 30 minutes before pairing riders up with a car. Not to guarantee any sort of safety or to fight congestion. It was literally just degrading service in order to make taxi companies more competitive with Uber, Lyft, etc.
Trying to achieve stability frequently hurts users and degrades quality of service.
This is a bad comment. The OP had a valuable point that applies to companies inside and outside of this "gray area[]". You're just making a tired and repetitive dig at Uber itself. It may be that Uber's gig economy model has important downsides of its own, but the salient problem is of private control of what's become public infrastructure, and that has nothing to do with Uber being cancer or something.
Did Uber not do exactly what op said? Aggressively grow to capture markets before the legal system could react? How is that a bad comment? I mean, the original article is about Uber. How is op in the wrong by describing exactly the business model they adopted?
The OP isn't wrong: the problem is that his point is irrelevant. The real question, to which nobody has an answer, is this: what do we do as a society when a small number of private companies corner the market for an essential part of modern life and then institute arbitrary criteria for refusing service to people? How this situation came about doesn't matter. Uber making all drivers full employees would not change the dynamic one bit.
Complaining about Uber's employment model instead of discussing this really important control question just annoys me. It deflects a potentially interesting conversation into grievance-airing about gig jobs.
It’s irrelevant that a company is able to skirt regulation? Would Uber be in the position to “institute arbitrary criteria” if they had to compete in an environment with proper governance being in place?
The crux of your argument is we shouldn’t care about how we get there but what happens next or essentially, how do we react.
If you want to solve a problem, identify and fix the root cause instead of reactively applying some patch to cover the bleeding.
Getting “annoyed” at someone discussing the root cause is misguided.
On the contrary, we need to really understand how we got here first, in order to be able to recognize patterns of the problem and determine how to avoid it in the future.
As the saying goes, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.
It's somewhat relevant because it was plain as a day through continued behaviour that Uber is a sociopathic company. So while not all companies would follow the mechanic in question, and different companies may follow it at different pace, it was always obvious that Uber will screw riders over as soon as possible.
Fair point. I was a bit easy to comment. But there's a public side to my point. Services can be wiped with such business models which is detrimental to society. Amazon pushed a lot of people aside, now their prices are all but guaranteed to be fair.
- private company innovates a service that people use all the time - private company is so successful it displaces other, existing, methods of doing the same - private company becomes defacto monopoly in many cases - private company withdraws service from problem users - those users are left with no options
In the case of Uber, it is kind of obvious, as there are areas where they have displaced (put out if business) numerous private cab and car service companies.
Each step is a reasonable progression through our system. I don’t think anyone should be blamed for each step.
But the final result is beyond Orwellian.