I once had similar thoughts about, say, movie rating systems like IMDB. But you can pretty quickly convince yourself that straightforward ways of implementing t

I once had similar thoughts about, say, movie rating systems like IMDB. But you can pretty quickly convince yourself that straightforward ways of implementing this would open themselves up to horrific levels of system gaming very easily: a user who gives everyone a 2 but occasionally gives their best friend a 5 will wind up having that "5" normalized to some astronomically great rating (which even by itself could heavily inflate the friend's average). And every fix for that sort of thing that I came up with opened the door to yet another exploitable flaw or failure to accurately reflect user preferences. It's a hard problem. And especially in cases like Uber, I don't think there's a technical fix: as long as the company puts the cutoff for continued employment above the second-highest rating, there's a high perceived moral cost to giving a rating less than the maximum.