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."
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.