Originally Posted by
TyrianMollusk
Come on, Scottie, your soulless corporate rep "talk about your feelings" prompt didn't even pick any of the people saying they were unhappy with the rating system. Quit phoning it in. We're your customers here trying to help you get more customers and make them happier.
The rating system has no granularity. It doesn't allow us to distinguish between a decent, good, or great track, just a good/bad divide. That has no utility for a variety of reasons. First, it simply takes away our voice. Second, it forces people to vote down good tracks because when they are only allowed one distinction, some will allow anything and some need to set a higher bar for their thumb up. Consequently, builders get down votes even on good tracks. Lots of down votes. Up votes are pretty meaningless, since up-voting pretty much means "sure, whatever", and everyone knows it, but those down votes are not meaningless. Each and every one of those say "I don't want this in the game." I've looked, and even fantastic tracks just tick those "you suck" votes up over time. You're channeling vague, uninterpretable negativity at builders, which is destructive.
Next, you look at the system overall. Counting upvotes is useless and communicates nothing to us, yet that's exactly what you do. Up-voted tracks continue to get up-votes in typical rich-get-richer fashion, devaluing their down-votes and devaluing newer content. Down-votes don't seem to actually matter anywhere, they are just there to hurt builders.
Then, there's the effect on voters. Up/down leads users not to make any real distinction, except that down is bad. Thus down is avoided more than it should be since we all appreciate effort to some degree, while no one thinks up particularly matters. Studies have been done on getting good useful feedback from people. Know how many gradations it takes? Ten. Not two. Ten. Five doesn't even do a great job, it's just less atrocious than something completely useless like two.
We ought to be rating tracks on a five-star scale with half stars, using a radial selection where all choices take equal effort and the default is not voting, with labels on at least the base groups of 1-3, 4-7, and 8-10. The sub group labels really help to normalize ratings and produce more meaningful results. Again, this has been studied. There is a right answer. This doesn't even take more storage in your database to manage.
Basically, since a thumb up/down system allows no one to distinguish between decent, good, and great, the entire system is utterly useless for distinguishing decent, good, and great, which is pretty much its purpose. On top of that, it's useless for distinguishing bad and barely even helps on awful--the only other value it might have. Your rating system doesn't do anything. It's like you in this thread: It says some things, but there's no attempt to correlate to the content or to actually improve the user experience. It just wastes the time of the people actually thinking about ratings.
In short, there is not a single thing to like about the rating system. Not one single thing. That's what I don't like about it. It's lazy, destructive, valueless, and doing better is unbelievably easy.