Uber, Peeple, and the anti-social ethos of the “Rating Economy”
“They seemed very happy with the room, they even thanked me for the quality of the beds”, tells me my B&B host. “Then unexpectedly they left a negative review. I was really taken aback. Mine is a small business, and that was my eight reservation. It has taken months to recover from that negative score”.
What was the reason for the review? “The club nearby”. There is a club about 800 metres from the B&B. “It was very loud. I was not in that night. They did not call me, nor they contacted the authorities. They left and made my TripAdvisor score plunge”.
I have no reason to doubt this story, which is a summary of my issues around what we normally refer to as the “sharing economy”. I think the problems extends beyond the mere “sharing economy” and encompasses a more subtle category of services; let’s call it the “rating economy”.
The Rating Economy
In most cases, the rating economy has produced rather innocuous outcomes, and in many cases empowered consumers. Review websites have, for the first time, allowed consumer to expose commercial bad practices, through a single, personal action, and this has had an effect on the quality of services. Or at least so it goes.
What I find troubling about the rating economy has nothing to do with the positive effects on service quality, but on the shifting of concept of ethics and personal responsibility. I believe that the rating economy fosters behaviours that have nothing to do with sharing or community, but have an anti-social tendency — not in the sense that it pushes users to draw graffiti, but that it brings away direct arguments and engagement between real people. Interaction goes down to an impersonal moment of leaving a score far away from the service provider, in a way that often does not let them respond properly.
The recent controversy around Peeple is rather representative of these issues. Peeple brings the rating economy to an extreme level, offering a surreal service to rate people. Anyone. Although the website has so far disappeared, in an apparent attempt at softening their proposition — or, more likely, because it was a hoax — the mere announcement of a “Yelp for the people” sent ripples down the Interwebs. Real or not, Peeple has helped highlight the dark side of the rating economy: suggesting that people might now get rated beyond their will is not such a far-fetched idea in a context where we are being rated for sharing rooms that are not bright enough, driving cars too fast, or sending parcels too late.
From rating to lack of interaction
Of the many reasons I am not too keen on Uber — and there are many — what I dislike the most is the fact that it brings away the interaction with the driver when dealing about how they performed.
Among the several reasons for preferring Uber to traditional cab drivers, I have heard a lot of negative remarks about the latter, rather than praise for the former. Apparently cab drivers “are usually racists”, “drive too fast”, “take longer routes to make more money”, and so on. Let’s think about it: an Uber driver could be just the same, right? “But I can rate them, and they know it”. Nice, eh?
So we prefer to rate them. Instead of arguing with the driver that their driving is dangerous and asking them to change it; instead of telling the driver that we know the route and that what they are choosing looks too long (and possibly discussing with them why they have chosen it); instead of complaining about racism and maybe reporting a possibly illegal behaviour to the authorities; we choose to rate.
No accountability and no way to make amends
What are the consequences of this way of operating? There are mainly two.
The first is rather obvious: rating affects an average score. By doing so, it brings away direct accountability for a wrong behaviour; at the same time it does not provide an incentive or direct reward for a positive behaviour. If the driver is speeding, they should be stopped immediately: it is a behaviour that should not be tolerated. Relying on rating, means relying on the power of averages; this often means that a possibly criminal behaviour is only punished when repeated enough. But if the behaviour a customer is not happy with is genuinely negative, why not changing it when they have the chance?
As averages go, this also implies that the marginal value of a single rating decreases as the service providers accumulates more and more rating scores, exacerbating the problem of lack of accountability.
The second consequence pertains to the possibility of making amends. Once the rating is given, the average goes down; a Uber driver can even lose their “job” because of this. However, they have no way of doing something to rectify the situation of a specific episode. In our boring ordinary lives, if we fail a GCSE, we can re-sit it; if we break something, we can pay it back; with the rating economy, you are taking this possibility away.
Dehumanised averages
Going back to my B&B host, I have happily given them a good review. This is how it works. Yet again, I am worried about the consequences of thinking that rating is becoming a recognised and acceptable pattern of engagement. The rating economy is not uniquely responsible for turning human interactions into transactions; however, it is turning these transactions into something dehumanised that cannot be controlled; their outcomes have become averages that no longer bear any direct relationship to the transaction itself.
