What rating should you give the driver who just dropped you at your door via Uber or Lyft.  Well, unless they messed up in some noticeable way you give them a 5 out of 5 rating unless they messed up somehow.  That means you give the same rating to a driver who was just passable as to a driver who was outstanding, but you don't want to unfairly sink the career of the passable driver when everybody knows a 4 star rating is terrible.

In Japan things are different.  3 stars is considered normal so you can give that for a normal ride, and then you can give 4 or 5 stars for an exceptionally good driver.  And then you have Eastern Europeans who are reputed to tend to give low ratings except when service is unusually good.

Normally this doesn't matter too much unless you're an American Uber driver who happens to get a Japanese rider who sinks your rating with a 3, but it can have worse consequences.  Until a GPT large language model stopped speaking Croatian because it always got a low rating in that language.

 But my question is, why don't all these companies normalize the ratings users give?  If one person gives nothing but 5 star ratings don't just assume that drivers lucky enough to get that person are better than average.  If someone else gives nothing but 1 star ratings don't punish drivers who get them.  Let people give whatever rating they want but treat the normal rating from both these people as about a 3 and only treat a rating as unusual when it is unusual.

I'd like to be able to give a 5 for exceptional service on Uber but when a 4 is a punishment then I can't do that in good faith.  i'd also like to see the full range of responses in things like book ratings on Goodreatds.  This seems like an easy change but I'm genuinely mystified why its not applied anywhere I can see.