I’ve been here a while and I’m curious as to why the rating system is set up the way it currently is. The number of stars usually indicate how good something is unless there isn’t enough ratings to create a fair average (like only one person giving a thread a 5 star rating, therefore instant perfect score).
However, this means that most of the threads lack any ratings at all due to not enough people voting while only a few really good works have 5 stars. There are also very few threads that have a rating less than 5 because people don’t seem to agree on a score unless the work is nearly flawless (like one person’s idea of a 2 star work is equal to another person’s idea of 4 stars). Also, the works liked well enough to be rated 5 stars are usually placed in the forum gallery anyways, so if I wanted to look for the best works in this forum, I can look there. The rating system as a whole is a bit redundant.
What advantage does the star rating system bring us when we try to determine how well received it is by the community? Why not switch over to a different rating system like the upvote/downvote system? Or if we want to avoid the problem sometimes associated with downvotes (which some issues can still be found by rating threads with 1 star, but to a lesser degree), we could use a system similar to Facebook, where if we want to rate something, we can ignore it or hit the like button, and posts can be measured in rating by the amount of people who liked the post? Is there something I’m missing here to why we still use stars?
But what would be the point? I mean we kind of have two rating systems already. The stars and just straight forward attention (replies/views/longevity). If I’m looking for a thread that lots of people like, then I would look for something that has a lot of replies. I don’t need stars or likes to know that something is popular.
Also, Blender Artists is a community of people helping each other produce artwork - it’s not a media platform like YouTube or Facebook. People post threads here to get help from fellow artists - not to get likes (90% of the time at least.)
That’s the point of what I’m talking about, the stars don’t really serve much of a purpose and I don’t understand why they’re here. If we’re going to bother with a rating system at all, why not have something that could tell us more accurately about how good or interesting a topic is?
Maybe it would be better to just completely do away with the rating system since as you said, it’s a place where we get feedback for our work, not Youtube or Facebook, and ratings would possibly draw attention away from that idea.
I think one of the issues now is that five star ratings are much more common now than in the past (advances in Blender such as Cycles means it’s much easier to make a good quality image than when the system was first put into place).
In the days before Cycles, it took a clear mastery of lighting and shading trickery to get a 5-star image, now you have high quality lighting practically handled by the engine itself and good quality materials are easy to find. It is true that not every work is spectacular, but the other issue is that most people now simply don’t bother to give any sort of rating if it’s not 5 star material.
To be fair, once the forum [eventually] gets moved from Vbulletin to Discourse, it’s likely that we’ll be favoring an up/down vote system rather than a star rating system.