4.73

Uber has a new feature which I am sure won’t last too long because this is their crown jewels they are giving away.

In the Uber app if you navigate to ‘help’ and then select ‘account’ and then to ‘I’d like to know my rating’ up it (your rating) pops as per the exhibit below.

My rating is 4.73 stars.

I went through the odious task of counting my trips and discovered that I have made 188 Uber trips since 22/04/2014.

Noting that the ranking comes in single unit increments between 1 and 5 stars, if I assume that my lowest rating was a 4 stars, then 27% of drivers have ranked me a 4 star passenger instead of a 5 star passenger.

A good fraction of those early trips were in cabs because Uber started out their foray into the Sydney market as just another cab app.

And of course, not knowing about the rating system and not feeling too inclined to be either nice or otherwise to the culture of the Sydney cabbie, I may have lost a few stars back then.

But even so, it makes me wonder how drivers rank passengers.

One driver’s dream may be another’s curse.

After 20 inane conversations about your Mazda 3 and the weather, your introverted driver might just be willing to offer a 5 star ranking to the next taciturn passengers.

Whereas your extroverted driver might be offended by the silence from the back seat and proffer a 3 star rating.

The trouble with the Uber rating system is that it’s not symmetrical like AirBnB’s.

In the AirBnB app the ratings matter for both hosts and guests.

In Uber the passengers don’t care too much about the driver’s ratings.

They just want transport. Pronto.

In any case, you’d hope they recalibrate or ignore the hard markers such as Swiss nationals that are driving Ubers.