Climbing Out Of Facebook's Reality Hole

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SAN JOSE — It is spring in California and the rains have finally returned after years of absence. The grass is green, the hillsides are coated in yellow and orange and blue flowers, and the reservoirs are full again, hallelujah. Yet while the Spring rains may have washed away the drought, they have done nothing to alleviate the sense of existential dread — especially pervasive here in the techno-utopia of California —that the world we built has perhaps gone badly awry.

The proliferation of fake news and filter bubbles across the platforms meant to connect us have instead divided us into tribes, skilled in the arts of abuse and harassment. Tools meant for showing the world as it happens have been harnessed to broadcast murders, rapes, suicides and even torture. Even physics have betrayed us! For the first time in a generation, there is talk that the United States could descend into a nuclear war. And in Silicon Valley, the zeitgeist is one of melancholy frustration and even regret — except for Mark Zuckerberg, who appears to be in an absolutely great mood.

The Facebook CEO took the stage at the company's annual F8 developers conference a little more than an hour after news broke that the so-called “Facebook Killer” had killed himself. But if you were expecting a somber mood, it wasn&039;t happening. Instead, he kicked off his keynote with a series of jokes.

It was a stark disconnect with the reality outside, where the story of the hour concerned a man who had used Facebook to publicize a murder, and threaten many more. People used to talk about Steve Jobs and Apple’s reality distortion field. But Facebook, it sometimes feels, exists in a reality hole. The company doesn’t distort reality — but it often seems to lack the ability to recognize it.

You have to build for the reality we live in, not the one we hope to create.

The problem with connecting everyone on the planet is that a lot of people are assholes. The issue with giving just anyone the ability to live broadcast to a billion people is that someone will use it to shoot up a school. You have to plan for these things. You have to build for the reality we live in, not the one we hope to create.

While Zuckerberg has charted a statesmanlike evolution over the years, he and the company he helms too often have a blind spot for the way the world will react to products it unleashes on them. Certainly, that seemed the case at F8 today where a slightly rain-soaked audience groaned through Zuckerberg’s dad jokes and listened in anticipation as he teased what was to come. Then, abruptly, he shifted gears.

“Our hearts go out to the family and friends of Robert Godwin Sr.,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the 74 year-old victim. “We have a lot of work and we will keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening.” Then, as quickly as he hit the somber tone, Zuckerberg returned to platform optimism.

Todays news was largely about the company’s push into AR – augmented reality. Think: digital layers we can place atop the real world. Facebook says there will be three main ways this will play out: The ability to display information on top of the world in front of you, the ability to add digital objects, and the ability to enhance or alter existing objects.

Executive after executive took the F8 stage to show off how these effects will manifest themselves in the real world. Deborah Liu, who runs Facebook’s monetization efforts, encouraged the audience to “imagine all the possibilities” as she ran through demos of a cafe where people could leave yelp style ratings tacked up in the air and discoverable with a phone, or a birthday message she generated on top of an image of her daughter, while noting that with digital effects “I can make her birthday even more meaningful.”

And yet the dark human history of forever makes it certain that people will also use these same tools to attack and abuse and harass and lie. They will leave bogus reviews of restaurants to which they’ve never been, attacking pizzerias for pedophilia. If anyone can create a mask, some people will inevitably create ones that are hateful.

“With augmented reality,” Zuckerberg said, “you’re going to be able to create and discover all sorts of new art around your city.” Yes, someone can create a virtual painting, meant to beautify the city, or a leave virtual note to a loved one that reaches them at just the right moment, in just the right place. But someone else will probably leave a swastika. Because if there is anything to be learned about the modern internet, it is that if you build it, the Nazis will come.

But Facebook made no nods to this during its keynote — and realistically maybe it’s naive to expect the company to do so. But it would be reassuring to know that Facebook is at least thinking about the world as it is, that it is planning for humans to be humans in all their brutish ways. A simple “we’re already considering ways people can and will abuse these tools and you can trust us to stay on top of that” would go a long way.

Instead Facebook went into the reality hole. It touted Facebook Spaces, a new social virtual reality thing that helps you escape the world while experiencing it, too. As Rachel Rubin Franklin, who used to be executive producer of Electronic Arts’ “The Sims” game and now runs Facebook’s Social VR efforts, said of Spaces: “When your friends and family join your space, it’s just like really being together.”

But it is not. Your avatar is not human, no matter how real it looks. The digital world is not flesh or blood, but it can have a tremendous effect on things that are.

When Facebook announced live video almost exactly one year ago, Zuckerberg touted its ability to tap into the raw and visceral moments of life. But it didn’t take long for those moments to become too raw, and too visceral. When Zuckerberg released a 6,000 word open letter in February, and sought to overtly inject values into the company’s mission, he said he had been moved by a suicide broadcast on Facebook Live. But of course, the suicides keep happening. Facebook can’t stop this, of course, any more than it can stop murder or mayhem or death.

But the company can acknowledge that these things will happen, and it can do a far better job of planning for them. It can make it harder to use its platforms to harass others, or to spread disinformation, or to glorify acts of violence and destruction. As it rolls out this slew of new tools to augment reality, here’s hoping that Facebook will also climb out of its reality hole and face the world we actually live in.

Quelle: <a href="Climbing Out Of Facebook&039;s Reality Hole“>BuzzFeed

Mark Zuckerberg’s Next Big Bet: Making The Real World An Extension Of Facebook

Facebook

At F8 today, Facebook is announcing a bunch of utterly crazy shit that we&#039;ll soon be able to do to the pictures we take. That includes Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram and affects, oh, somewhere approaching 2 billion people. But while the company is talking a lot about cameras, it would be a mistake to look at what it is rolling out as a mere photography tool. Yes, there are cool picture effects. But what Facebook is really trying to do is to fully insert itself in the real world. Facebook’s augmented reality camera effects are an early attempt to let the digital infiltrate the physical, a way for the company to become the conduit between everything you see in the world around you, and all the information that exists, via your smartphone.

“Facebook is so much about marrying the physical world with online,” the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News in an interview late last week. “When you can make it so that you can intermix digital and physical parts of the world, that&039;s going to make a lot of our experiences better and our lives richer.”

“Facebook is so much about marrying the physical world with online.”

It is certainly going to make life weirder. At an earlier demo, when a group of 18 Facebook engineers gathered to show their work to an outsider for the first time, they were clearly nervous. One pointed his phone at a table, and a 3D propeller plane popped up on screen, circling around a water bottle that rested on the tabletop. Another used his phone’s camera to turn the room into a planetarium, with planets and stars hewing across the ceiling as shooting stars fired from side to side. Still another took a normal photo of a face — and then made it smile, frown, and gape with the push of a button. Little wonder they seemed on edge: The stuff they were showing off was wild and largely unprecedented.

This new Camera Platform, as the company calls it, is a major bet that the camera isn’t simply a tool used to capture images. It’s something you’ll use when you want to share photos and videos, sure, but also when you want to overlay digital experiences on the real world. Imagine, Zuckerberg urged, using Facebook’s camera to view pieces of digital art affixed to a wall. Or to play a digital game overlaid on a tabletop. Or to leave a digital object in a room for someone to later discover — perhaps even future generations. Imagine using your phone to take a 2D photo, and then transform that photo into a 3D space. Imagine manipulating a friend’s expression to make them smile, or frown, or, well, whatever. Imagine changing your home into Hogwarts for a Harry Potter-obsessed daughter. That’s what Facebook is doing. “We see the beginning of an important platform,” Zuckerberg said. Onstage at F8 Tuesday morning, he reiterated this point: “The camera needs to be more central than the text box in all of our apps. … We’re making the camera the first augmented reality platform.”

And you thought this was just about Snapchat.

AI at War

It’s easy to draw comparisons to Snapchat. And certainly the camera platform’s Snapchat-like effects are likely to grab the most attention early on. But the more interesting stuff that Facebook is trying to pull off involves layering the digital and physical worlds on top of each other — bringing the former into the latter, and vice versa. There will be three big augmented reality areas Facebook is pushing into. The ability to display information on top of the world in front of you, the ability to add new digital objects to your environment (think: Pokemon Go), and the ability to enhance existing objects.

For example, Facebook’s Camera can map out two-dimensional photographs in 3D. The company hopes developers will someday build digital products that behave and interact in those formerly 2D spaces, just as they would in the rich three-dimensional world we live in. Picture this: In one demo, Facebook showed off various 3D scenes created entirely from a handful of 2D photos. The scenes had real depth to them — you could peer around a tree in a forest, or tilt your head to see behind a bed in a room. With a few clicks, the lights went down in the room. The forest flooded with water. It was magic.

The demo was on an Oculus headset, but Facebook’s ambition is to bring these kind of scenes directly into the News Feed itself, no Oculus required. It wants people to be able to create and interact with them directly on their phones.

The ultimate idea here is to turn the real world into an extension of Facebook itself. “There&039;s all these different random effects which are fun, but also foundational to a platform where people can create 3D objects and put them into the world,” Zuckerberg explained.

To pull off these radical camera effects, the company turned to an unexpected source: its AI team. When Zuckerberg began setting plans in motion for his company’s camera platform more than a year ago, he tapped Facebook’s Applied Machine Learning group (AML) to lead it. That put the technology in the hands of team artificial intelligence geeks, not the graphic designers or 3D artists you might otherwise expect.

Facebook

While not a traditional imaging team, Facebook’s AML group does work extensively in visuals. Much of what the team does is in the AI discipline of computer vision, the science of training computers to analyze and extract information from images, the same way humans do (Think about the way Facebook or Google can identify a face or a landmark in pictures uploaded to them). The group’s computer vision expertise made it an ideal fit for a project predicated on understanding what’s appearing before and beyond a camera lens.

As Facebook’s AML group went to work on Camera last summer, it waded into a thicket of wildly popular rival camera products. Snapchat’s beloved selfie filters, for instance, had inspired hundreds of millions of shares and put the company on the fast track to a multibillion-dollar IPO. Meanwhile, Prisma, a photo app for iOS and Android, was using AI-powered effects to break down images and redraw them in the style of famous paintings.

Facebook promptly put its AML group on lockdown, a drop-everything-and-work-on-only-this measure the company sometimes uses when developing products it sees as highly competitive. Facebook famously went into lockdown to improve its site performance and user experience in 2011 following the debut of Google+.

Yet by the end of lockdown, the camera team had pulled off a significant feat: It had neural net–powered AI software working directly on people’s phones — not remotely on servers where this kind of stuff has traditionally operated. That meant Facebook now had the ability to read and manipulate images very quickly, and could create powerful camera effects that were previously infeasible due to computing limitations.

The first effect the team developed was one called “style transfers.” Like Prisma, it redrew photos as artwork, but unlike the app, it could do so almost instantly. The AML team created a green-screen effect that could pick out a person’s body and put all sorts of backgrounds behind it live in camera. It built filters that automatically identified common objects that might appear in images and created specialized effects for more than 100 of them: a heart-shaped cloud of steam that rises from a cup of coffee, a propeller plane that circles household objects, starscapes that transform a bedroom into a planetarium, and more.

The centralized camera team quickly became the de facto hub for camera effects across Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook proper. Build once; deploy everywhere. “This is heaven,” Joaquin Candela, the head of AML, told BuzzFeed News. “We have this massive release channel and we’re just going to keep putting stuff in there.”

And Facebook won’t be alone in “putting stuff in there” — at least not if things go the way it hopes. Over the coming months, Zuckerberg said, the company plans to give developers (and to a more minor extent the public at large) a chance to use its tools to create their own filters and effects for Facebook’s cameras. Developers who want to build their own apps, games, and art will be able to do so, opening up a wide array of creative possibilities that Zuckerberg himself admits — and perhaps even hopes — will take Camera in unanticipated directions.

And in opening its platform, Facebook will give developers access not only to AML’s tools, but also to its multi-app, billion-plus-person release channel. “Even though they&039;ll feel a little bit different in terms of features between Instagram and WhatsApp and Messenger, all the stuff that developers are going to build is going to be fundamentally compatible with cameras in all of these,” Zuckerberg said.

Snatch That

But, okay, remember when we said it’s not about Snapchat? Well, it’s also more than a little bit about Snapchat. Or at least, it’s certainly heavily Snapchat influenced.

Facebook

In the past few months, Facebook has gone hard at its neighbor in Southern California, adding Snapchat-style ephemeral stories to Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. Snapchat, for its part, isn’t standing still, today releasing its own set of augmented reality effects, albeit underwhelming compared to Facebook’s. When BuzzFeed News asked Zuckerberg if he was happy with Stories’ performance in Facebook, and showed him an utterly barren Stories section on an account with more than 700 friends, the Facebook CEO swallowed, paused, and replied “it’s still early.”

True&#033;

While Zuckerberg may urge patience, it’s likely his new camera platform will be judged in the early going by whether it can help Stories take off inside all Facebook products — not just Instagram, but Messenger, Facebook and WhatsApp as well. And the seeming failure of stories to gain traction inside places like the main Facebook app, or Messenger, raises the question of what truly belongs there. Because Facebook’s real power is in its network.

The same social graph Mark Zuckerberg talked about at F8 some 10 years ago — the one that connects you to your old friends, new acquaintances, high school teachers, and probably a lot of co-workers — remains its defining characteristic. The lesson of Snapchat seems to be that some things make sense on the big social graph, and some things don’t. And what will that mean for all this augmented reality? Are we really going to want to see flooded forests in our feeds?

And yet there is also this: A year ago, the social giant was in the midst of a small crisis, fending off a challenge from Snapchat which seemed to now own the fun, raw moments that originally gave social media its charm. Meanwhile Facebook proper was experiencing a decline in orignal sharing. In response, Facebook ruthlessly copied Snapchat Stories into all its products. And while Stories may seem like a wasteland in the main Facebook App, last week, daily users of Instagram Stories surpassed Snapchat as a whole (at least based on the latest numbers Snapchat provided). There are a lot of ways Facebook can use its network to win.

So, yes it’s still early. And yes, this may be a shot at Snapchat. But the war is for something much bigger. It’s about using the thing in your hand to analyze, interpret, explain, and fundamentally alter the way you experience the world around you. “We just view this of part of the first round of what a modern camera is,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg recalled telling his team a year ago that the path ahead of them wouldn’t necessarily be smooth. That they’d ship products missing many of the capabilities the company intended to develop down the road. And that they’d have to deal with whatever criticism came at them. “We&039;re going to go through a period where people don&039;t understand what we&039;re doing. And don&039;t understand the full vision,” Zuckerberg explained. “But, hey, that&039;s the cost of entry to doing anything interesting.”

Quelle: <a href="Mark Zuckerberg’s Next Big Bet: Making The Real World An Extension Of Facebook“>BuzzFeed

The Galaxy S8 Is A Gorgeous Phone. Too Bad It’s Made By Samsung

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

No company was closer to being a trash fire in the past year than Samsung. There were the exploding Note7 batteries, then the exploding Note7 battery replacements, then the exploding washing machines, and then, finally, the exploding Samsung battery factory.

Needless to say, the Korean conglomerate, which recently lost its 1 smartphone maker ranking to Apple for the first time in eight quarters, is looking for a win.

Enter the Galaxy S8, the headliner of Samsung’s Redemption Tour.

During my five days of testing, the Galaxy S8 did not catch fire. In fact, the S8 turned out to be exactly what I had expected after my first hands-on: a gorgeous device with great technology inside. Samsung crammed as much screen into this phone as possible. The Galaxy S8 hardware is 83% glass slab and 17% everything else — and it has all the promise of an iPhone/Pixel killer.

The only problem? Like all Samsung phones, it’s pre-loaded with redundant apps and features you don&#039;t need. And, though the Galaxy S8 ships with the latest version of Android (7.0 Nougat), eventually the phone will be about five months behind Google’s future operating system updates.

All that aside, the S8 is a *really* good phone, and Samsung devotees with contract renewals coming up are going to want to upgrade ASAP. But those looking to switch will have a lot more to consider.

There’s nothing else on the Android market quite like it.

If you’re looking to get a new high-end Android phone right now, here are the three phones I think you should be considering: the Google Pixel, the LG G6, and the Galaxy S8. (For the purposes of this review, I’m not looking at Motorola, Sony, HTC, or Huawei. Don’t @ me.)

Aesthetically, it’s clear which one is the standout: the Galaxy S8. In my initial review, I loved everything about the Pixel, except its uninspired hardware design. LG’s G6 and its small, display-maximizing borders are, in many ways, similar to the Galaxy S8, but it’s a heavy phone that feels bulky.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

The S8, on the other hand, is wrapped in a slick, polished case. This is especially true of “Midnight Black.” It is Posh Spice wearing an all-leather catsuit and Samsung&039;s other color offerings (“Arctic Silver” and the purplish “Orchid Gray”) pale in comparison. The S8 looks modern and clean, and you’d be hard-pressed to find another Android phone with its looks.

The mind-bogglingly good edge-to-edge wraparound display is crisp and saturated, which we&039;ve come to expect from Samsung. The blacks are extra dark and text appears sharp, pixel-less. The display bleeds into the surrounding hardware, and it’s hard to tell where the screen ends and the phone begins.

The only “bezel” is a centimeter-ish border at the top and bottom. There are no physical buttons on the front of the phone, just a pressure-sensitive, virtual home button area. Every other leading Android phone maker has already removed the home button, and Samsung finally followed suit. To maximize the immersive screen experience, the home button is sometimes invisible (like when you’re watching a video full-screen or playing a game) and you can simply press down on the bottom of the screen to return to the main page.

These screens are huge. There are two models: the S8 with a 5.8-inch display and an S8+ with a 6.2-inch display; both are at 2,960×#1,440 resolution. The viewing area has been increased by 36% from the previous versions, the S7 and S7 Edge.

But it doesn’t feel like you’re toting around a mini tablet. The nearly half a million extra pixels were added to the S8’s height, and its edges are curved on all four sides, so the phone is surprisingly grabbable.

The curved edges do, however, make texting with two hands in portrait feel a little cramped. When turned on its side, the phone is too wide for my hands to reach the keys in the middle. Perhaps big-handed users will have better luck.

It’s a very tall phone (nearly 6 inches for the S8 and slightly over 6 inches for the S8+), so enabling the phone’s “one-handed mode” has proven very useful for me. You can swipe your thumb diagonally from either bottom corner to use a mini, more manageable version of the software. Although, my frequent use of this feature reveals that perhaps I don’t need a big screen at all?&#033;?&033;

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

Apparently the S8 is “mobile HDR premium certified,” which means that when you watch shows or movies, you see the same colors and contrasts “that filmmakers intended,” according to Samsung. So I did what any other reviewer would do “for journalism”: I bought the Planet Earth II “Mountains” episode and poured myself a glass (or three) of wine (spoiler alert: ibex goats are badass AF). The display is very bright and vibrant — good for getting into Planet Earth, but ultimately worrisome because I fear it will eventually burn my eyeballs to a crisp.

The S8 is 83% screen, so it’s only fitting that this review is also almost 83% about the screen. Here comes the other 17%.

I tried my hardest to trick the S8’s face recognition unlock, but to no avail.

Reports that Samsung’s face recognition technology had been defeated with a photo surfaced last month. I tried to replicate this with a printed-out photo, with a photo onscreen, and with a Photobooth video of me staring at the camera and blinking. The phone was unfazed. I will never be a hacker.

Trickery aside, face recognition is more a matter of convenience than security. It makes up for the awkwardly placed fingerprint sensor and I found myself relying on it quite a bit.

The fingerprint sensor has moved to the back, much to my chagrin.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

The fingerprint unlock feature has traditionally been programmed into the device’s home button. Seeing as the S8 ditched the button, it’s now on the back of the phone. The S8’s fingerprint sensor and the camera feel basically the same, which means I kept smudging the camera lens and unlocking the phone at the same time. It’s really too bad because, minus the finger smears, the camera is quite good.

Speaking of the camera, it’s the same as the Note7’s and the Galaxy S7 before it.

The phone’s rear camera hasn’t changed. It’s a 12MP lens with f/1.7 aperture, and it notably does not have the “dual lens” setup (a camera with two lenses) that Apple, LG, and Huawei introduced with their most recent flagship devices. But I didn’t really miss it in the S8.

Samsung likes to tout its primary camera’s low-light capabilities and fast auto-focus, even with motion. At full zoom, it handled capturing this surfer fairly well (in the rain&033;):

And this darting newt:

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

And this amazing lemon poppyseed bundt cake my friend Lauren made:

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

The real news is the S8’s upgraded front-facing camera, which is now 8MP (up from 7MP in the Note7) with the same f/1.7 aperture. Here’s an unedited Samsung selfie:

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

And an iPhone’s (the iPhone’s camera is just 7 megapixels):

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

The main difference is that, because it’s a higher-resolution image, you can zoom in more on the Samsung selfie. I&039;ve showed these photos to multiple people — and votes are split right down the middle. The look of a photo is ultimately a matter of preference and I will let you, Internet, be the final judge.

There are also new Snapchat-style stickers built-in, which…sigh.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

Bixby, the S8’s artificially intelligent assistant, is kind of…dumb right now.

Samsung created its own version of Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. It’s called Bixby, and it’s really an umbrella term for three different “intelligent” features: computer vision/image recognition software, a voice-enabled assistant, and a namesake app called Bixby that shows you different personalized “cards” that offer information like weather and upcoming flights (essentially this Google app feature).

Bixby Voice
What makes Bixby different from other assistants is that anything you can do on your phone with touch, it can allegedly do it with your voice instead. You can say things like, “Set display brightness to maximum” and more contextual requests like, “Rotate this photo to the left.” Unfortunately, Bixby Voice doesn’t launch until later this spring and I didn’t get to test it out myself.

Bixby Vision
I was, however, able to try Bixby’s vision recognition software, which uses the phone’s camera to “see.” For example, you can hold up a QR code and Bixby can take you directly to the link, or you can scan a business card and Bixby will isolate the text, then automatically add a contact from the camera app. It does those two things perfectly fine, but it’s not exactly groundbreaking tech. There are plenty of apps that can do the same thing.

One of the seemingly cooler features is being able to point your camera at a piece of furniture or clothing so Bixby can use use Pinterest-powered computer vision to find out where to buy it. I was excited to try this and hoped it would eliminate “where did you get that” small talk with more stylish ladyfriends.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

But when I tried it out (on my boyfriend’s white Adidas shoes and a pair of amazing culottes), Bixby showed me Amazon results that matched the general shape/generic version of what I was trying to search for — and nothing else. In fact, for the culottes, Google reverse image search fared much better and found a Pinterest pin with the specific brand in the description (they are Oak+Fort, btw). I then tried taking a pic of the pin with the hopes that the Pinterest-powered software would pick it up. Nada.

Bixby Vision results are like asking your mom for a custom American Girl doll that’s designed to look just like you, and getting a Secret Hero Mulan from a KB Toys closeout sale instead.

Bixby App
I didn’t find the Bixby app too helpful. It showed me details for an upcoming flight and the week’s weather, plus trending topics on Facebook, which was cool. There was a random puppy napping GIF from Giphy as well, though I’m not sure if that was personalized content.

Right now, it’s hard to assess whether Bixby is a success, because so much of the technology is still in development. As it stands, Bixby is a gimmick that’s fun for showing off to friends but not smart enough to actually be useful. Plus, Google Assistant, which ALSO comes with the S8, can do just about everything Bixby can do and then some.

The battery didn’t explode.

The 3,000 mAh battery in the S8, the version I tested rigorously, performed well. The phone, as I’ve previously mentioned, is all screen, so it isn’t surprising that the display was my 1 battery suck for three days in a row.

The phone’s battery takes about an hour and 40 minutes to fully charge via USB-C cable, and has lasted me about a day and a half on average. This is with reading articles in an hour-long round-trip commute, watching 30-minute videos, followed by 30 minutes of gameplay, and with the usual slew of Facebook and email notifications enabled. Batteries, of course, decay over time, so I’m not sure how long that’ll last. I’ll update this review if that changes.

It feels fast enough.

The Galaxy S8 is the first device to ship with the newest Qualcomm processor: the Snapdragon 835, which is faster than its predecessor (the Snapdragon 820) but uses less power than other chips. The phone felt zippy during this first week of testing, but, like batteries, its processor will decay over time.

I played Super Mario Run, a casual sidescroller, and CSR Racing 2, a 3D graphics-intensive racer, a LOT during the testing period. They played smoothly and didn’t significantly drain the battery.

The processor is apparently robust enough to power a computer, using the new Samsung Dex portable dock accessory (price TBD) that can be hooked up to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The dock essentially turns the phone into an instant, lightweight Chromebook — in the demo I saw, the phone ran two apps simultaneously. I didn’t get to test the Dex out either, but once I do, I’ll update this review.

And now, a rant.

As gorgeous as the hardware is, the S8 is a Samsung phone, and I can’t review this device without noting this disclaimer: Samsung phones are (still) filled with so much crap. Samsung’s OS (called “TouchWiz”) looks cleaner than ever before, and it’s getting better. But it remains full of bloatware.

For example, I tested a T-Mobile version of the device. Right off the bat, there are four T-Mobile apps on the homescreen that I’ll likely never use, including “T-Mobile TV.” Then there are Samsung apps, like the mobile browser aptly named “Internet,”plus the Google versions of those exact same apps, like Chrome, already installed. There’s Android Pay, and Samsung Pay. There’s Gallery, and Google Photos.

Then there are Galaxy apps (which are apps made by Samsung or special “themes” to customize how your phone looks), in addition to apps you choose to download from the Google Play Store. There’s a dedicated side button for Bixby Voice, and OK Google can be activated by longpressing the home button. It’s a hot mess.

All of this is pre-loaded on the phone — and I know it can be removed from the home screen or uninstalled, but…ugh&033;

Samsung deeply alters the Android experience, down to the way windows scroll in the app switcher. You’ll see on the Pixel that there’s a smooth, continuous scroll and on the S8, a clunkier unit scroll.

Quelle: <a href="The Galaxy S8 Is A Gorgeous Phone. Too Bad It’s Made By Samsung“>BuzzFeed

Furious Indians Are Leaving Snapchat One-Star Reviews In The App Store Because They're Mad At The CEO

A former Snap Inc. employee has claimed that CEO Evan Spiegel allegedly said that he didn&#8217;t &#8220;want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain.&#8221;

A former Snap Inc. employee has claimed in a lawsuit that CEO Evan Spiegel said that Snapchat was “only for rich people”, and that he didn’t “want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain.”

Lucas Jackson / Reuters

The news was reported by Variety earlier this week.

In a statement provided to BuzzFeed News, a Snap Inc. spokesperson said: “This is ridiculous. Obviously Snapchat is for everyone&#033; It&#039;s available worldwide to download for free.”

Over the weekend, however, Indians battered the Snapchat app with angry reviews and poor ratings in the Indian App Store.

BuzzFeed News screenshot

They called Spiegel “delusional”…

App Store

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Quelle: <a href="Furious Indians Are Leaving Snapchat One-Star Reviews In The App Store Because They&039;re Mad At The CEO“>BuzzFeed

Nintendo Has Discontinued The NES Classic Reboot And People Are So Mad

Nintendo will stop shipping the reboot of its Nintendo Entertainment System console in North America this month.

The company wouldn&#039;t say what the cancellation meant for shipments of the console outside North America. The reboot, dubbed the NES Classic Edition, launched on November 10, 2016, and even though stores were plagued by severe shortages, Nintendo sold 1.5 million individual units by January 2017. News of the discontinuation was first reported by IGN.

Nintendo of America said in a statement to BuzzFeed News, “Throughout April, NOA territories will receive the last shipments of Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition systems for this year. We encourage anyone interested in obtaining this system to check with retail outlets regarding availability. We understand that it has been difficult for many consumers to find a system, and for that we apologize. We have paid close attention to consumer feedback, and we greatly appreciate the incredible level of consumer interest and support for this product.”

The company elaborated, “At this time, we have no plans to produce more NES Classic Edition systems for NOA regions.”

People were confused and angry.

And they wondered what the decision was really about.

Some people on Twitter speculated that the move was meant to protect Nintendo&039;s other consoles like the Switch and its virtual console, where you can buy digital versions of the same classic cartridge games that were available on the NES classic.

But mostly they were crushed.

Goodbye for now, NES. You will be missed.

But you still could get one, maybe&#033; They&039;re shipping till the end of April&033;

Quelle: <a href="Nintendo Has Discontinued The NES Classic Reboot And People Are So Mad“>BuzzFeed

These Takeout Robots Won't Wipe Out Delivery Jobs Just Yet

Marble

Yelp is getting into food delivery, and it&#039;s using robots to do it.

It&039;s long been possible to order takeout through Eat24, which is owned by Yelp, but until recently, restaurants that accepted orders through Eat24 mostly did the deliveries themselves.

Now, Eat24 wants to handle some deliveries itself — only with robots instead of people.

Starting in San Francisco on Wednesday, some hungry customers ordering from specific restaurants on Eat24 will be asked if they&039;re okay with getting their food delivered by robot. If they say yes, the robot will head to the restaurant from either its home base in a garage, or a convenient nearby spot where it&039;s been inconspicuously waiting for instructions. Then an employee will come outside, open the robot with a four-digit code, and insert the order into a warming bag inside. When the robot is on its way, the customer will receive a text message from Marble with a four-digit code, which they can use the retrieve their order curbside when the robot arrives. No tip necessary.

Hiring people to deliver food in their cars can be inefficient, said Matt Delaney, CEO of Marble, the company that builds the robots Yelp is using. Eventually, he says, using robots to get food from a restaurant to your doorstep could be cheaper than paying a person in a car to do it. He think that someday, it might even save you money on takeout.

Of course, that&039;s not great news for the people who currently rely on income from doing deliveries. But the upside is, Marble&039;s robots probably won&039;t be turning the restaurant takeout industry on its head any time soon.

First of all, during this pilot project, Marble&039;s robots are only doing deliveries from four restaurants, all in the same neighborhood, and only during dinner time.

The robot uses mapping technology and a suite of sensors to navigate the city, but it still needs a human chaperone to walk beside it. That means it can&039;t move very fast, so realistically it can only deliver to people ordering food from within a relatively small radius of just two neighborhoods, the Mission and Potrero Hill.

It also can&039;t be used in the rain, and requires someone back at headquarters to monitor its progress via video live stream and a suite of sensors — which means instead of one human needed per delivery, Eat24&039;s system in its current form requires at least two.

But just because Marble&039;s robotic restaurant delivery won&039;t be widespread doesn&039;t mean it won&039;t attract attention — and not all of it will be positive.

Marble&039;s delivery robot is very big and takes up a lot of room the sidewalk. It&039;s kind of a rolling reminder of the tech industry&039;s encroachment on jobs, and on culture in general in San Francisco.

And that&039;s not something people necessarily want a giant, autonomous, rolling reminder about. In fact, when BuzzFeed News visited Marble&039;s San Francisco headquarters to watch the robot at work, we encountered a passerby who clearly had some feelings about the whole thing. “Fuck you&#033;” he shouted, maybe at us, but mostly at the robot. “This is what&039;s ruining the city&033;”

Luckily, Marble&039;s CEO said, not only can Marble employees use video game controllers to navigate the robots to safety if they run into trouble, but they can also speak through the robot, and tell would-be adversaries to back off.

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Quelle: <a href="These Takeout Robots Won&039;t Wipe Out Delivery Jobs Just Yet“>BuzzFeed

Google's New Tool Turns Your Goofy Drawings Into Slick Graphics

Google just released a fun little tool called Autodraw.

It uses machine learning to predict what your scribbles are supposed to look like by comparing them to drawings in its database. You can use it on your phone, your tablet, or your desktop — anywhere with a browser. If you want to use your drawings (or the perfected versions of them that Autodraw suggests) later, you can download them. And if you&#039;re an artist, you can donate drawings to the database.

You start with a blank canvas.

After you draw whatever you can dream up, Autodraw offers you a bunch of images of what it thinks you were trying to draw.

Then Google will turn it into a better-looking version of what you tried to draw.

I was drawing a peach (badly), and Autodraw predicted I would want a streamlined version of a strawberry or an apple. Not bad.

Its other options were a little more wild.

So I was drawing a peach, and the first few options were fruit. But after I scrolled past the fruit drawings Autodraw predicted, its guesses got more creative. Did I mean to draw a rat? No? Maybe some sandals, a bunch of toes, or a Great Horned Owl, then.

Majestic beasts, owls — but fruits they are not.

As I&039;m sure many people will attempt, I tried to draw a penis. But no luck.

Fun to know that I could communicate my yoga routine to someone else, though.

Maybe Autodraw would have an easier time recognizing an eggplant.

Nope. It thought I was trying to draw a mermaid.

Another one of its suggestions looked a whole lot like a bong.

But it could be a vase, who&039;s to say?

When I scrolled a little further, I found a banana. Close enough.

How about the President?

This got really rough. I&039;m not great at drawing. It&039;s also possible, since Autodraw is new, that there isn&039;t a sketch of Donald Trump in the tool&039;s library for the algorithms to find.

These are the first options:

A backpack?

“The president&039;s face is a big toe” sounds like a protest sign.

But those are the options it suggested alongside smiley faces.

The owl returns&#033;&033;&033;

My favorite suggestion.

In conclusion, Autodraw could help you draw better versions of the things you want to draw, but keep yourself open to possibilities. It can also suggest things you never knew you wanted and that you probably don&039;t need.

Have fun scribbling&033;

Giphy

Quelle: <a href="Google&039;s New Tool Turns Your Goofy Drawings Into Slick Graphics“>BuzzFeed

What Happens When Your Neighbor Is A Venture Capitalist

Via sfphoenix.wixsite.com

Waging a public battle against your rich neighbor with obscene tech money is practically a Bay Area tradition. In David Cowfer’s case, his angry website about an invasive species of Silicon Valley billionaire practically wrote itself. Cowfer is fighting plans to turn a six-bedroom family home in a sleepy cul-de-sac on a picturesque Glen Park hilltop into the ultimate bachelor gymnasium, including a basketball court, lockers, sauna, wet bar, lounge, and a cantilevered swimming pool. Plans also include a two-story garage door with glass panels will roll open to show a spectacular view of San Francisco — and could cause a spectacular nuisance for Cowfer, who lives next door.

The house, which sold for $2.35 million in 2015, was purchased under an anonymous LLC. So it took Cowfer nine months to figure out that the baller behind the renovation was prominent venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a Silicon Valley veteran with a contrarian Twitter account and a Stanford pedigree, who, like his buddy Peter Thiel, is also part of the so-called PayPal mafia.

This is when an ordinary NIMBY narrative — of the haves vs. the have-mores — veered in caricature. San Francisco’s Planning Department found nothing objectionable about Rabois’ construction plans, but Cowfer filed for a discretionary review to bring the issue before the city’s seven member Planning Commission. At a hearing on Thursday, neighbors told the the commission that Rabois is building a personal recreation center, not a home, because Rabois already lives in another home in the same small cul-de-sac, purchased for $3.5 million in 2011. What’s more, his co-worker at Khosla Ventures, venture capitalist Benjamin Ling, owns a $1.8 million house, purchased in 2013, next door to Rabois’ primary residence.

“It&#039;s like a Zuckerberg-style neighborhood takeover&#033;” Ryan Patterson, Cowfer’s lawyer, told BuzzFeed News after the hearing, in reference to the CEO of Facebook secretly buying up the four houses surrounding his Palo Alto mansion in 2013. “It’s a cul-de-sac with a lot of homes built in the ‘60s. Now we have two billionaires who own three homes within 150 feet of each other,” said resident Mark Brennan, who grew up across the street in the same house where his parents still live.

Rabois, however, didn’t see the big deal. “What does that have to do with anything?” he asked BuzzFeed News in response to questions about how two investors from the same firm happened to live on the quiet same block. “He bought a house, people are allowed to buy houses. People think it’s some kind of conspiracy, but I found a cool neighborhood,” and my friend followed, said Rabois.

Cowfer’s website, No Court @ Everson, refers to both investors as billionaires, a claim that was picked up in coverage of the dispute in Curbed, SFist, and a local CBS station. There is one small glitch in the all-powerful techie narrative: Ling is not a billionaire. When BuzzFeed News asked Rabois to verify the billionaire claim for himself, Rabois wrote back, “Lol.”

The view from the property being renovated

Via zillow.com

For Cowfer, however, signs of a hostile takeover kept adding up. A few months ago, a real estate agent cold-called him on behalf of Ling about buying his home, which Cowfer interpreted as an attempt “to remove me from the equation,” he said. Ling characterized it differently in an email to BuzzFeed. “I had heard that the property might be coming on the market shortly, and had made a single inquiry in hopes of getting an early look, but nothing ever came of it.”

Rabois insists that he’s made every effort to follow the rules. “[San Francisco is] one of the most heavily regulated real estate markets in history. This is so in the middle of what’s acceptable to complain about,” he said.

But at the hearing on Thursday in City Hall, neighbors argued that the renovation is out of character for Glen Park. Cowfer told the commission that lights and noise could drive down the value of homes by as much as 25 percent. “In a neighborhood where the homes are priced anywhere between $2 million and $4 million, this is not insignificant,” he said.

“I have no problem with him spending his money; he should be spending that in Pacific Heights,” said Joe O&039;Donoghue, the former head of the Residential Builders Association and final resident to argue against Rabois at the hearing. O&039;Donoghue, who speaks in a heavy Irish brogue, was the most animated speaker that afternoon, throwing his hand out with disgust when he mentioned Rabois’ plan to build “a garage door going nowhere.”

The Bay Area has a rich and varied history of absurd real estate spats between tech moguls and their neighbors. In 2011, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison got ticked off because his neighbor’s redwood trees blocked the view from his house on Billionaire’s Row in Pacific Heights. (The Wall Street Journal tried to inquire about the debacle, but “Mr. Ellison would only speak through his tree attorney,” the paper reported.) Typically these kind of clashes happen in tonier neighborhoods. Perhaps the basketball tussle in Glen Park, once a streetcar suburb for working and middle class residents, is just a sign that these disputes are moving down market.

Like real estate fights everywhere, each side is painting the other as unreasonable. Rabois had a company board meeting and couldn’t attend the hearing, but he told BuzzFeed News, “[Cowfer is] wasting taxpayer money, driving the staff actually crazy.”

Residents, however, insist that Rabois is downplaying the scope of initial plans of the basketball court. “The way Rabois’ team is talking now, it almost sounds like they’ve got a nerf hoop down there [and are] just goofing around,” said Brennan, who also pointed out that Rabois pushed through related permits before this dispute was settled.

The Planning commissioners concluded that there was enough common ground around Cowfer’s request — to shift the basketball court into the hill, so that it doesn’t jut out as far — that they told the two parties to take a few weeks and see if they could sort it out.

“This is a fairly quiet neighborhood. I don’t think people want a bunch of valet partners coming up here all the time and having all these wild parties, said Brennan “It’s not the Red Army coming out of the mountains to try to take this guy’s property away from him.”

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Quelle: <a href="What Happens When Your Neighbor Is A Venture Capitalist“>BuzzFeed

Here's How Accurate The Fitbit Alta HR Actually Is

We pitted Fitbit&#8217;s new ultra-slim wristband against a chest strap to see just how accurately it could measure beats per minute.

There are a lot of reasons why you’d want to get a fitness tracker. Maybe you’re trying to gather insights about your sleep, or get fitter, or lose weight. Whatever your goal, one thing is true: a fitness tracker is useless if it can’t accurately measure whatever it is you’re trying to track.

Fitbit recently debuted the Alta HR, an ultra-slim wristband with a new feature: heart rate tracking. But just how accurately can the wearable track your beats per minute? When we did a first impressions review of the Alta HR last month, our preliminary tests suggested that the tracker’s heart rate technology wasn’t always on point. So we spent the last two weeks working up a sweat while wearing the new band — and as we originally suspected, the Alta HR struggled to keep up with exercises with a lot of movement and high intensity bursts. It did, however, reliably measure resting heart rate.

Experts say most people don’t actually need to know their exact heart rate during workouts, so this may not matter to you. But accuracy does matter for some, namely people with heart conditions and endurance athletes. Fitbit also heavily markets the heart-rate tracking capability of its latest devices, like the Charge HR, Blaze, and Surge — and last year, it faced a class-action lawsuit over its allegedly inaccurate technology. (The company has called the allegations “baseless” and contested the lawsuit, as well as noting that the devices are “not intended to be scientific or medical devices.”)

With all that in mind, we set out to answer the question: Should you still consider the $150 Alta HR? Here’s what we found.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

Unfortunately, we didn’t have access to an electrocardiograph, a medical device that’s considered the gold standard for heart-rate measuring. Instead we used the next best thing — a chest strap monitor, which multiple studies have shown to be significantly more accurate than wrist-based heart rate monitors, as our control. And we enlisted Open Lab Fellow/chart master Lam Vo to help us sort through all of the data.

For each run and bike ride, we wore a Polar H7 chest strap, in addition to the Fitbit Alta HR and Apple Watch. Nicole wore the devices on different wrists, while Stephanie wore the devices on the same wrist.

Nicole’s Long-ish Run: A Close Look at the Data

During my first-impressions workout, a quick 17-minute run with short, intense uphill sprints, the Alta HR had trouble measuring my heart rate. So, this time around, I went for a longer interval run, switching between a light jog and uphill sprints, for about 40 minutes. The terrain was a mix of trails and concrete on rolling hills.

After the run, I checked each device’s workout summaries.The Polar Beat app measured a 160 beats per minute (bpm) average. Compared to that measurement, the Apple Watch overestimated the average by 1 beat (161 bpm), and the Fitbit Alta HR underestimated by 3 bpm, which is pretty impressive and consistent with Fitbit’s claim of average absolute error of less than 6 bpm versus an EKG (electrocardiograph) test strap.

I extracted the heart rate data from each device, and Lam created an interactive chart, so you can see exactly how the wearables performed throughout the duration of my run (try clicking the names of the device and hovering your mouse over the graph&#033;).

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

Lam Vo / BuzzFeed News

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Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s How Accurate The Fitbit Alta HR Actually Is“>BuzzFeed

Nobody Knows What Five Star Ratings Mean. That’s Bad For Gig Workers.

In a San Francisco Lyft car, there&#039;s a chart taped to the back of the front passenger seat: “The Rating System Explained.” It details — in exaggerated terms — what Lyft&039;s one- to five-star rating scale really means to drivers.

Beginning at five stars — “got me where I needed to go” — the explanations quickly descend into parodic paranoia. Four stars: “This driver sucks, fire him slowly … Too many of these and I may end up homeless.” Three stars: “This driver sucks so bad I never want to see him again.” Two stars: “maybe the car had something dangerously wrong with it or he was doing 120 in a 40 mile zone.”

Caroline O’Donovan / BuzzFeed News

One star? “Threats or acts of violence possibly made, perhaps a callous disregard for his own safety.”

Though tongue-in-cheek, this rating system explainer touches on an essential truth of the gig economy: When companies like Lyft, Uber, and Postmates penalize workers who have low ratings, anything less than five stars feels like a rebuke.

“The rating system works like this: You start off as a five-star driver,” Don, a San Francisco Lyft driver told BuzzFeed News. “If you drop below a 4.6, then your career becomes a question. Uber or Lyft will reach out to you and let you know that you are on review probation. And if you continue to drop, then you&039;re going to lose your job. They&039;ll deactivate you.”

The gig economy has made us comfortable rating the people we pay to do tasks for us. Both data and anecdotes suggest five-star rating systems are subjective, prone to bias, and generally confusing, yet labor marketplaces continue to ask customers to choose from one to five stars to determine who’s good at their job and who isn’t. Last week, Netflix officially replaced its five-star system for rating movies with a more simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down. Maybe it’s time for other data-driven platforms to consider making a change, too.

“They think that 3 is okay, and a 4 is like a B.”

Don’s concern about the impact of a low rating is well-established: Workers in the on-demand economy are at the mercy of the customers, whose in-app ratings can jeopardize an individual’s ability to earn bonuses, land gigs, and generally make a living.

Uber says only a very small percentage of drivers have ratings anywhere close to the deactivation threshold, which is a different number depending on where in the world you’re driving.

In a statement, a Lyft spokesperson said that in order to “ensure that drivers are not rated unfairly for circumstances that are out of their control, a number of steps are taken, including: ratings are based on an average of the last 100 rides; the system does not look at drivers in isolation, rather it looks at them in comparison to other drivers in their region; and drivers are able to submit comments after each ride to raise any concerns about the ride or passenger.”

But ratings are nonetheless a stressor for some drivers. Julian, who drives for both Uber and Lyft in San Francisco, said maintaining a good rating can be difficult because customers don’t really understand them. “They think that 3 is okay, and a 4 is like a B, and 5 is exceptional,” he told BuzzFeed News. “Well, if you got a 4 every time, you’d be terminated. You have to maintain a 4.7, so anything less than a 5 is not okay.”

Julian, a driver for Uber and Lyft

A few months ago, Julian was driving a female passenger to her hotel when he realized she had passed out in the back of his car. Julian called the police, who told him to roll her over onto her stomach — but he was worried about what might happen if she woke up while he was trying to help her. “The sad thing is, I was most concerned about my rating, because it was below a 4.7,” he said. (The woman woke up and ran into her hotel, Julian said; he doesn’t remember if she left a rating.)

This sort of rating anxiety extends well beyond Uber and Lyft. “The rating system is terrible,” said Ken Davis, a former Postmates courier, who noted that under the company&039;s five-star rating system couriers who fall below 4.7 for more than 30 days are suspended. Said Joshua, another Postmates courier, “I really don’t think customers understand the impact their ratings have on us.”

“I really don’t think customers understand the impact their ratings have on us.”

Instacart uses a five-star system, too; shoppers whose rating is in the top 25% of their region earn a $100 bonus. Shoppers say in most regions, just one rating that isn’t a perfect five stars usually disqualifies you for that week’s bonus. “It&039;s unbelievably annoying to wake up and see that a customer complained about something and you know it&039;s either not your fault or not true,” said Liz Temkin, who shops on Instacart in Los Angeles. (Temkin is a named plaintiff in the recently settled Instacart class-action lawsuit.)

Instacart had not provided a comment by the time this story was published. Postmates did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The problem is, for an Instacart shopper to earn a bonus or a Postmates courier to keep their ratings up, they need the vast majority of their ratings to be five stars. Some savvy users (read: millennials) know this, and are sparing with their four- and three-star ratings. “Unless they&039;re super rude or weird, I tend to give everybody five,” said Kristen, a visitor to San Francisco who had just stepped out of a Lyft in Union Square. “That actually means something on the app. I don&039;t want to mess up their life, you know?”

But not all customers are so well informed. Wendy and her son Brian, visiting San Francisco from Indiana and using Uber for their first time, were surprised to hear that most drivers consider four stars to be a bad rating. “I would have thought 5 is excellent, and 4 is good,” Wendy said. That revelation was equally shocking to Elnaz, a longtime Uber user visiting San Francisco from LA. “Four-star sucks,” she said, incredulous. “Really?”

“Customers don&039;t understand the impact ratings have on couriers at all,” said a former Postmates community manager, who requested anonymity while discussing her previous employer. “A customer might rate a delivery three stars, assuming that three stars is fine. Several three-star ratings could bring a courier’s rating down significantly, especially if they’re new. It could even get the courier fired.”

Matthew Smith is yet another Uber and Lyft driver who, frustrated with the five-star rating system, took it upon himself to draw up a custom explainer for the back seat of his car. Smith&039;s is succinct, and reads “5 stars = This ride was acceptable or better, 4 stars = this driver should be fired.”

Yet another homemade ratings explainer, this one by Matthew Smith, who wrote “4 stars or less = This driver should be fired.”

Matthew Smith

“I have consistently had riders blown away that giving me a 4 was such a bad thing… they really do feel that a 4 was a good ride,” Smith, who lives in Colorado, wrote via email. “Since having this sign up, I have had about 35 rated trips, all five stars.”

Uber and Lyft both say the vast majority of drivers do get five-star ratings. But while they argue this is evidence that most drivers are doing an excellent job, it might actually be further proof that the five-star rating system doesn’t work.

Some ride-hail passengers say they give drivers five stars because they’re worried about what might happen if they don’t. “I always give five, unless they&039;re really rude or something,” said Golda, another Uber passenger. “I actually heard that even below a four or five, they can get in trouble. They&039;re just trying to earn some money, so it has to be pretty bad for me to give a bad rating.”

David Celis, a software engineer at Github who used to run a beer-rating website, says it’s not just empathy that causes people to give a lot of five-star ratings. It’s also because five-star ratings systems in and of themselves lead to choice paralysis. “The more options are presented within a rating system, the more mental effort it&039;s going to take to give a rating,” he said.

Back in 2009, YouTube found that “the overwhelming majority of videos on YouTube have a stellar five-star rating.” Shiva Rajaraman, then a product manager, started to wonder if there was something wrong with their feedback system, which was “primarily being used as a seal of approval, not as an editorial indicator of what the community thinks about a video.” Six months later, YouTube replaced its five-star ratings with a thumbs-up, thumbs-down system. If Uber and Lyft were to adopt a simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down rating system, Celis said, “on the consumer end, it would be a much better experience.”

The other problem is that not everyone can agree on what the star ratings mean — not even the companies themselves. Lyft says that five stars means “awesome,” four means “Ok, could be better,” and three means “below average.” But for Uber, five stars is “excellent,” four is “good,” and three is “OK.”

Individuals have different interpretations, too. “For some people, three could mean this is good, while four is great and five is perfect. Some people might say, nowhere is going to be perfect, so I’m going to say five stars is really good, and four is good,” Celis said. “The way you can interpret those stars is infinite, and most people don’t have the exact same system.”

Five years before Uber even existed, Yelp popularized the use of five-star rating system for reviewing restaurants and other businesses. “On Yelp, anything four stars or above is very good. Three to four stars is, it might be worth your time. Less than three stars, that’s where you start to see businesses actually fail,” said Darius Kazemi, a computer programmer and former elite Yelp user. But because of the artificial cutoff use by Uber and other apps, that system doesn’t map perfectly to the gig economy, which leads to confusion for consumers. “The Yelp cutoff for ‘You’re fired’ is three. That’s the point where you see businesses lose money. That’s a lot lower than Uber’s parallel cutoff.”

If people ascribe different meaning to the five-star ratings, and the ratings functionally mean different things depending on what app or website you’re using, it seems unlikely that the data these rating inputs produce are very meaningful. Some labor marketplaces, recognizing this, have started experimenting with ways to lessen the impact of five-point rating systems on their workers.

Rinse, an on-demand laundry service, used to text customers asking them to rate their delivery person from one to five, but the average score “basically hovered around 4.9 over the entire time period we tested it,” said co-founder Ajay Prakash. Prakash determined that the texts, which very few customers responded to anyway, weren’t producing data of much value, and scrapped them. Another example is Managed by Q, a startup that dispatches field operators to clean and manage office spaces, which stopped asking customers to rate workers partly because it created tension with clients. “Five-star review systems on their own are not good barometers of individual performance,” said Director of Product John Cockrell in an email.

“I was like, Holy shit&#033; The guy was nice, I wish I hadn’t done this.”

But in the world of online work, the five-star rating system remains pervasive. On sites like Fiverr and Freelancer.com, ratings left by clients affect freelancer search rankings. Feedback systems on sites like these tend to have more components than gig economy apps, but the impact is similar: the lower your rating, the lower your search rank — and the less likely you are to book a lucrative gig. Said Freelancer.com’s CEO Matt Barrie, “It&039;s kind of like Uber.”

Michael Truong is a senior product manager at Uber, where he’s working on improving the company’s rating system. “We&039;re really trying to understand what riders’ feedback is for a ride,” he said.

Truong told BuzzFeed News that Uber once considered switching to a thumbs-up, thumbs-down system, but decided against it. “The emotional burden riders have, where they feel like their driver is going to get deactivated if they give a low rating, pushes people away from a thumbs-down,” he said. “So we would have no opportunity to relay that feedback to drivers.”

For the last few months, the Good Work Code has been compiling research on how to build a better rating system for labor platforms. “The managers of the company want information about how a job or gig was done, and the customer wants to offer feedback. But how do the workers actually get information that allows them to succeed and thrive in these working arrangements?” asked Palak Shah, director of the Good Work Code’s parent organization, Fair Care Labs. “It&039;s our sense … that there&039;s a lot of opportunity for growth and improvement.” The report — which recommends transparency, human interaction, processes for disputing ratings, and system that’s more dynamic than “on a scale of one to five” — is supposed to be published in the next few weeks.

John Gruber, publisher of Daring Fireball, is among those who believe that five-star rating systems don’t produce particularly useful data, and that generally speaking, binary systems are better. “There’s no universal agreement as to what the different stars mean,” Gruber told BuzzFeed News. “But everybody knows what thumbs-up, thumbs-down means.”

A few years ago, during a trip to Orlando, Gruber had an experience that made him realize how this confusion over what the stars mean can impact individuals in ways customers don’t realize. After taking a ride in an Uber that had an overpoweringly strong smell of air freshener, Gruber gave the driver a four-star rating. The next day, he got a call from an Uber employee asking him to explain what the driver had done wrong.

“I was like, Holy shit&033;” Gruber said. “The guy was nice, I wish I hadn’t done this.”

Quelle: <a href="Nobody Knows What Five Star Ratings Mean. That’s Bad For Gig Workers.“>BuzzFeed