be rating and berating
i didn’t know this, but if you go into your uber app, you can find out that drivers rate you as well. and i’m a polite muth f*cka, so i though, ok, let’s find out how awesome these jerks think i am. and i got a 4.89/5. which means some snot nosed punk ass didn’t give me a 5! what the actual crap, uber? which brings me to my new corporate sponsor! ‘Uber, cause a stranger is just a friend that rates you based on a brief interaction, and who hasn’t had a proper background check’
it’s interesting though, cause it puts me in mind of other social networking sites. there was a brief lived, and heavily mocked application that was marketing itself as a sort of ‘yelp’ for people. sign up, find a person, give them a rating and a review. and seeing as how we all know yelp has never been abused by petty people with an axe to grind, what ever could go wrong? well, the app got crushed under the weight of bad publicity, which is a bit of poetic justice that was lost on the creators. but more than that, it gave people an insight into how this was kind of a terrible/natural evolution in our desire to manage things. improve with criticism.
honestly, i think this kinda thing was pioneered with ‘slam books’, something i recall the more evil kids doing when i was a tyke. you take a notebook, put names and mean little questions in it, and pass it around from kid to kid. they would write nasty shit in it about anybody and everybody. i mean, there was no internet yet, and someone had to start cyber-bullying already. the technology just hadn’t caught up yet!
past readers may remember my fondness for a little show called black mirror. which is more like a series of very clever movies, dealing with technology and media.
this episode in particular is germane to what i’m talking bout. it takes place in a future world where everyone is rated, constantly, on every interaction. and this cumulative rating dictates what kind of opportunities you can have. it’s kinda like 1984, if everyone was big brother. nothing is honest, and people pretend to get by.
but check it out, it’s a sort of polite dystopia. and without the lasers and robots, so what’s even the point?
i was going to end this post with a mini rant about a youtuber i heard of, that jumps off buildings to wow idiots on the internet, who turned to crowdfunding to cover the cost of his inevitable medical bills. however, on further investigation, it seems that his efforts to get you fine people to pay for it are failing, and all is right with the world. hey, i don’t wish anyone any ‘specific’ harm, but if you mess up your feet being a dumbass, well, darwin had a theory, it was a good one.
with that, i’ll announce my marathon drawing weekend coming up, please visit my patreon, and donate generously. there’s a chance i won’t walk away from this one, and could in fact shatter both my wrists…. but it’s unlikely.
You did read your own comment and notice that you tell us that you rate us a 4 and btw don’t rate me a 4 pls thx?
oh…. i just noticed that too. i misread it the first time…. huh.
well, he might be joking. might not even be a driver. it’s the internet. who knows. but, if you were an uber guy, that would be a little hypocritical. and i only say so, cause i’ve heard, that a low enough rating can get a rider banned too.
I did. I also said I give 5 UNLESS there is a good reason, and the difference is that your rider rating is meaningless in the scheme of things, while a driver’s rating isn’t. I was pointing out that many people give 4 because they think they are giving a good rating, when in fact they are not.
fair enough. in school, a 4 would still be an A. we probably think of things that way. and like i said, i heard riders can be banned too, though that wouldn’t affect them as much.
but that just goes to what i was getting to. ratings are meaningless, until we assign importance to them. and then they can can have impact far more severe than intended. i wonder if dating apps should pioneer a rating system. things would get out of control instantly.
As a matter of course I rate riders a 5, unless they have chosen to take a pool ride, they get a 4 unless they were particularly good riders. But we don’t really use the rider rating to decide whether or not to take the ride. On the other hand, if our driver rating drops to low (below 4.7 where I am), we get suspended. So please remember, if you give us a 4 that is a failing grade.
oh yeah? you’re a driver? yeah, i heard about the fireable rating being pretty high, which is weird, cause on one hand, you have people who whine about how uber drivers aren’t vetted properly, and if you take uber, you’re bound to get raped and or killed, then you hear that if they dip under a certain rating, they get canned. maybe murder only gets you a 2 star rate.
i’ve never actually given anyone lower than a 5. i would, if someone had been rude, but it hasn’t really happened. and then you see yelp, which is like the wild west of reviews. someone might give a restaurant a 1 star cause the water had ice in it. the point of the black mirror episode, was that the people who had higher ratings themselves had more weight to the ratings they gave. which, might seem ideal, until you create a new class of highly rated people. and it could happen.
That Black Mirror episode made me so twitchy. As does the thought of you being rated down by Uber. Did you make crazy faces at the person? Refuse to speak? Smell funny? Does it list a category in which you were lacking? So strange…
well, of course i stink and make faces, but that shouldn’t mean nuthin. but 4.89 out of 5 isn’t really bad, i was just joking.
an adult grading another is like we’re structuring a way in which we can notify one another as to where we’re failing other people, treating each other as children still learning. life isn’t like that, as i found out when i gave my wife a B- as ‘spouse’ the other day. good, but room for improvement. she suspended me from class, and i got an F for ‘humour’. last F i’ll be getting for a while….