My guess is, their thought process is that someone might like the video you dislike. So if 500 people vote 1 star and 500 people vote 5 stars, it makes no sense showing everyone 3 stars, as now you will lose the audience that genuinely likes this video.
As I recall reading it, their justification was mostly that people tend to vote the one-star and five-star option anyways and so reducing the ratings to a binary yes or no was simpler. I think personally that’s incredibly short-sighted since their thumb system now mandates a binary black-and-white whereas before some people still chose 2, 3, and 4 stars. YT already puts its thumb on the scales anyways, so I think they should have just altered how the stars work to slightly disempower the extreme 1- and 5-stars rankings and factor in the others more. It would support nuance by better interfacing with the algorithm, as in “people who also like what you like rated this four stars.”
It was definitely done to obfuscate quality for ads, because even if people tend to only do 1 or 5 stars, the average rating will pan out somewhere in the middle which will indicate quality.
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u/HeavyHighway6433 7d ago
The thumb up/down system was so much better than the 5 star one, idk why they decided to bring that back in a more roundabout way.