
Exploring portable ratings for gig workers - kawera
https://medium.com/doteveryone/exploring-portable-ratings-for-gig-workers-5632fd9b262e
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crispyambulance
Not sure how I feel about "portable" ratings. Sometimes people just need a
fresh start and a chance to reinvent themsleves with a new gig in something
totally new. If enough folks start carrying around their stars from one gig to
another, employers are going to expect it.

Gig workers who find themselves in a rut of poor performance for one reason or
another just aren't going to be able to escape the old judgements of their
performance for much longer periods of time. It's oppressive.

~~~
ryanianian
It's a double-edged sword. I've hired some pros on Thumbtack and Taskrabbit
that were industry veterans and had to struggle to re-earn their reputation
when starting from fresh on gig sites. They probably really would have
benefitted from being able to carry a reputation from other systems.

Making reputation-follow "opt-in" makes a lot of sense. (Perhaps with
egregiously negative reputations being weighted at least somewhat.)

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
Sure, that would make sense for the top 10% of performers. But most people
aren't in the top 10%. They're already working in the "gig" economy, which is
notorious for its instability and continued deleveraging of the worker.
Wouldn't this just amplify those issues over time?

~~~
ryanianian
I don't see how it would amplify over time - in fact maybe the opposite. If
you could opt-in to carry over, you build your reputation over time even as
various gig marketplaces come and go. It encourages new marketplaces because
workers don't have to worry about building up a good reputaion all over again
on a new site, so they're probably gonna be more likely to try out new sites.

It discourages scammers because customers know even workers that are new to
the platform have built up a good reputation elsewhere, and they know that
anything seriously bad will follow them.

I see primary difficulty in how to communicate the "egregiously bad reviews
will follow you" effect and how to determine which reviews are egregious. Plus
it's like 100% probability of it being gamed with bad-actors somehow...

(Personally I'd define the "egregiousness scale" to be a time-weighted average
that's also weighted by the percentile of the reviewer's average rating - if
you give all your gig workers 3 stars, then 3 stars is effectively 5 stars for
you so workers see that benefit, and reviews further in the past count less
against you both pro and con. But I'm not qualified to know if this would
actually work out.)

~~~
lev99
It makes someone new to the economy have to work even harder to get a start.

If there is a new gig platform and I have 0 rep, that's fine because everyone
has 0 rep.

If there is a new gig platform and I have 0 rep, and a lot of people brought
their portable reputation with them, it means I have a disadvantage.

It does provide more knowledge to consumers, and it does allow people to make
different choices about who works for them.

~~~
ryanianian
I like your notion of a level playing field, but I think you're basically
saying we should ignore past experience on other marketpalces because it
favors people with an established track-record? Isn't someone with a proven
track-record exactly the kind of person we _want_ to favor?

Gig marketplaces come and go. If you spend 5 years working dozens of jobs a
week to build up thousands of positive reviews only to have the marketplace go
belly-up and now you have to start at zero, how do you think the gig economy
can retain actual talent that expects to get paid well for their proven track-
record?

Or put it another way: I personally like the option of being able to pay more
for people with a long history of positive reviews. I'm willing to pay much
less to hire an untrusted worker. I don't think I'm alone. If everything
starts at zero every few years, then all the wages reset to baseline every few
years as well.

Sure let people start at zero, but also let them get paid like an untrusted
worker. And sure, let people bring over their experience. But let them get
paid and charge like they have that experience.

~~~
lev99
Describing who benefits from properties of one policy (non-transferable
reputation) is not an inherit stance in favor of that policy.

Every policy has winners and losers. I just felt like on this discussion
thread there was a loser (people entering the gig economy) not mentioned.

~~~
ryanianian
Good point.

------
kbart
The fundamental problem of the rating systems is how to prevent one party or
another (those who receive and those who write reviews) from abusing the
system for their own advantage? The two obvious problems are: 1) fake reviews
2) blackmailing ("give me free stuff / discount / do what I say or I'll give
you 1 star").

While the first problem is obvious, the latter is especially hard and I have
yet to see it solved properly. The only place that comes to my mind that has
somewhat mitigated it was early eBay that had ratings for both sellers and
clients, so dishonest client would receive low ratings. But it also tended to
discriminate new users as there's no way to distinguish between a honest, new
user and just another single-use account for a scam. Furthermore, it only
works on an established system, as you need to have many ratings to filter out
noise, so it's a chicken/egg game ("nobody uses platform, because there's not
enough users" / "there's not enough users, because nobody uses the platform").

I don't see how these problems could be solved without a 3rd party
arbitration, but to do this you have to move back to square 1 (centralized
service).

~~~
philipodonnell
Bi-directional reviewing from verified transactions seems to work well in dark
markets on both of those problems, which are probably one of the marketplace
structures with the least amount of in-built trust. You also see 'also find us
on xxx market as yyy' which is an attempt at transferring reputation.

~~~
kbart
Yes, but as I've mentioned, you need a 3rd party arbitrage/platform on every
transaction to achieve that which counters the "portable" idea.

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frgtpsswrdlame
This is so indicative of the difference between the US and China.

So in China they're looking at a Social Credit System (which has been talked
about here before [1][2]) which is a government program which would apply to
all Chinese citizens and rate their trustworthiness. It's seen as
authoritarian, providing no way to start over, etc.

Here in America we've got this post and it's implication that we're going to
institute a similar social credit system except it will come from
corporations, not government and it won't apply to everyone, only gig workers.
It's seen as an interesting technical problem and a way to increase market
efficiency.

A tale of two viewpoints.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13201926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13201926)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9445538](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9445538)

~~~
trs80
Reminds me of Black Mirror episode where everyone is rated by the number of
stars they receive and are obsessed with the likes or dislikes. 0 stars end up
in a dungeon even if they've broken no laws. Very cypberpunk/dystopian.

~~~
dv_dt
If you look at the practice of redlining the extension of credit within the
boundaries of black urban communities for home and business loans this was
basically applied at a neighborhood wide scale. The negative effects are still
seen today. One would essentially lose stars for living in a certain area or
being a certain race.

~~~
aianus
I pay double for insurance because of my age and genitals but that's ok
because statistics /s

~~~
abakker
Devils advocate: since insurance is a business of pricing risk, isn't the
point of it to use statistics to charge more to higher risk people? I've been
in that group/situation before and it sucks to pay more, but, in a sense it is
_more fair_ if you pay more to be a higher risk, otherwise you end up charging
lower risk people the difference.

~~~
temp-dude-87844
The point of insurance is to group recipients with different likelihood of
risks into the same risk pool, such that it's very unlikely that many of your
insured will need a payout at the same time. How you set pricing is largely a
different matter.

Now, as an insurer, you have a monetary interest in ending up with as few
riskier clients as you can. You can try to use pricing or exclusions to try to
achieve this, but regulations often step in, because otherwise only the least
risky clients could obtain insurance, and everyone else would have to fend for
themselves. However, the least risky people often don't even want to purchase
insurance, because they perceive its utility to be low, and the incidence of
catastrophic events to be unlikely.

This generally means that clients who perceive themselves to be low-risk will
place a lower value on insurance, necessitating a lower price, or they'll take
their business elsewhere or nowhere at all. People who perceive themselves to
be higher-risk will "accept" a higher price, because they expect to have a
better outcome with insurance than without. Since companies want to _avoid_
this type of customer, prices can creep higher than they need to be just by
factoring in their risk.

~~~
lotsofpulp
This discrepancy happens because insurance works well for unknown risks that
are independent from the entity being insured and for uncorrelated events.
Similar to healthcare, vehicle collisions are highly dependent on the driver,
and so some of the risk is not unknown, and hence can be priced.

Pretending you don't know the risk factor when you do (perhaps in the name of
fairness) can also cause problems.

~~~
aianus
The low risk group (older, married, men and women) are the best positioned to
absorb a rise in premiums so I'm not sure what problems would be caused.

------
lozenge
> we felt like we had a sense that reputation portability was a real issue for
> some gig economy workers

But it wasn't an issue for the "gig economy" platforms. They are happy to lock
in workers by not exporting ratings. On top of that, accepting imported
ratings would provide a boost to the competitors that export ratings. So,
what's the business case?

Pretty design, but I'm amazed somebody could write an article covering so many
detailed questions and not even touch on this rather fundamental one.

It reminds me a bit of the heady OpenID days where every piddling website was
an OpenID IdP (identity provider), but next to no websites actually accepted
OpenID logins.

------
zackmorris
Since these systems all attempt to extrapolate future performance based on
past experience, they are almost by definition an affront to free will.

The problem is that when something as important as someone's livelihood
depends on factors outside their control (like someone else's subjective
impression of their performance) then it opens the system up to
corruption/gaming/extortion.

It's probably valid to keep a log of someone's employee history. But it must
be under that person's control and they must have avenues for disputing its
contents or expunging it in its entirety (similar to a bankruptcy).

If we go down this road, then it must be balanced by employer ratings such as
payment followthrough.

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kristianc
>> “Cab” drivers didn’t have visible habits around their ratings, weren’t
checking them frequently and when we spoke about them, they told us that this
wasn’t something they’d considered before or something they were particularly
concerned about. They were confident in their skills and ability to find work
outside of their platforms, and viewed ratings more as performance indicators
for their platform owners — the main fear being a drop below 3.5 stars, where
they might be dropped from the platform completely.

This is a shorthand way of saying the drivers themselves aren't even checking
their ratings, as long as they're above the performance threshold! This
paragraph gives away who 'ratings portability' is really serving, and it is
not the drivers.

~~~
pavel_lishin
It's neither the _drivers_ nor the _customers_ , either. When I need a Lyft, I
don't get a choice between three drivers with various star ratings - I enter
my location, and someone accepts the ride. The rating is only good for the
_employer_.

~~~
jjevanoorschot
The rating also benefits the customers. You don't get a choice between
drivers, because only drivers with a high enough score will be allowed to
continue on the platform. This might be harsh to the drivers, but it makes for
a good customer experience. It's one of the reasons why the experience of
using Uber/Lyft is so much better than the experience of using most
traditional cabs.

~~~
Pamar
Unless Uber/Lyft decide that below-4-stars rated drivers can keep working for
them... they just receive a smaller cut of the price paid by the customer.

------
ejlangev
Social credit imposed by corporate rather than state power isn't any less of a
bad idea. Perhaps there are reasons why every decision a person has ever made
shouldn't follow them forever such that they need to show it to their future
employers.

A better system would be to just force people to wear their overall positive
rating percentage visibly on their clothes in large red print. We can call
it... the scarlet number.

------
oldcynic
There's a Black Mirror episode for this isn't there?

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niftich
From a technical standpoint, this is largely the same problem as the
portability of other user data, with the added complication that the data must
be signed by an identifiable originating party other than the user that the
receiving party can correspond -- and establish a trust relationship with --
to verify the lack of tampering.

Online services have been around for a long time and yet very few implement
data portability. Often, it's part of their moat against competitors and
ensures lock-in. Few incentives exist for incumbents to offer data export.

From a social standpoint, this raises some serious issues. Distributed
reputation systems exist informally, whose lack of universal applicability
give them _some_ protection against trivial malice. In the financial world,
various credit scoring systems use trusted third parties to aggregate
information from entities one has transacted with, and offer a service for
other parties to obtain this information on the user's request. In some places
government-issued strong authentication is used to establish identity, but in
the US, weak identification and publicly available information is used as a
challenge to the user to establish their identity. Both of them come with a
host of issues that ought to be cause for concern.

If no link to some "higher form" of identity is implied, then the problem
becomes almost trivial: each user of 'Service A' can become a cross-referenced
user on 'Service B' by proving control over their account in 'Service A'. But
this too is vulnerable to credential theft, and new guises can be created at
any time by just creating additional accounts in 'Service A'.

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jdlyga
Definitely not. I saw the Black Mirror episode.

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m0llusk
The biggest problem is objective metrics. Did someone try to make contact when
something came up? Were they on time? Did the work get done properly? Did the
provider behave in a professional manner? All of the most important judgments
are inherently subjective and biased. This then leads up the chain into the
problem of rating the rating reputations of the raters.

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walshemj
Why would you need this for these "gig" economy jobs as they are all low/no
skill jobs all that's required is that you have no alternate job and are
desperate.

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delinka
I was recently reading [1]. In Chapter 2, this kind of 'ratings sharing' is
detrimental to your own employment. Didn't work so well at the last place? The
software remembers and won't hire you for the new place. If that's where this
is headed, it won't be good.

[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

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mr_spothawk
Can we call it "day labor" from now on?

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ilaksh
We need portable data for everyone and everything, but we also need to be
careful to do it in a way that doesn't become oppressive and centralized or
inflexible. So there should be some compatibility but not a single system or
rating.

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JustSomeNobody
How do you keep it from being gamed against women and minorities[0]?

[0] For example.

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weego
Hey it's The Circle but even more naive.

~~~
dang
Please don't post snarky dismissals here. An informative comment can be
critical while teaching the reader something, but this just puts down
someone's work.

