It is true that every little bit of effort added will stop more people from leaving ratings and reviews. That's why I'm against forcing people to leave reviews or attaching reasons to their ratings. Do that and the "quality" of reviews might go up, but it's going to cause a significant decrease in overall reviews/ratings which is more harmful than having random people dropping 1-stars simply because they don't like a story. This is simply making it so that ratings would be public, though. It's just like if you add a story to your reading list (or your reviews/favorites on RR). They're all visible to anybody who looks. People still add books to their reading lists. People still review/favorite stories on RR. There's no extra effort involved. Is there a tiny bit of extra "risk" in the event of pissing off an author who doesn't know how to hold back their ego? There is, but there's always a risk of upsetting some random person on the internet. I don't see any reason for ratings to be anonymous when reviews, comments, reading lists, and so on aren't. You can even track who is reading your story and what chapter they're on which is, in my opinion, more invasive than being able to see who rated your story.
Realistically, since this would--admittedly--discourage some 1-stars, stories would have higher average ratings and that would bring in new readers. Would it mean the scores are inflated and not really that accurate? Absolutely, but it wouldn't decrease the amount of readers. Most readers don't think about things like the average scores of a website and whether or not they might be inflated. Most readers look at a high number and that's it. High numbers good. Anyways, I don't mean to encourage inflating the ratings or anything. I would prefer a way to get much more honest ratings without discouraging people. The vast majority of stories, my own included, should probably have significantly lower ratings than they do seeing as how a "3" is supposed to be the average, not a "4.3." I just wanted to point out that, technically, I believe it would probably boost the reader count since this only really affects people leaving negative ratings.
They can and they often won't. Hundreds of authors, every single day, get new, scathing reviews and ratings on their stories on RR and SH. Tens of thousands of authors if you want to bring Amazon into the equation. The people who actually go and cause witch hunts are not only in the extreme minority, but they tank their reputation over their inflated egos by doing so. It only does more harm to them to try and get revenge ratings. These people also tend to be the loudest, though. Vocal minority and all. The vast majority of authors realize that's simply how it is and don't really give enough of a shit to go and hunt people down and wage war over it. Though, even they would generally like to at least know why they got a rating, and this can help with that.
Again, let's let readers grow some thicker skins then if we're going to apply that same standard to authors. For example, somebody recently posted about how they felt attacked by an author. I saw somebody talking about it, so I was curious and went to look up what they might have been talking about. They made the author sound pretty bad, so I wanted to know if the author was as bad as they sounded. All I ended up seeing was a perfectly mature and sensible conversation between author and reader with the author being patient, respectful, and calm when explaining the purpose of their story to their reader. Yet, the reader made it sound like the author was attacking them and purposely trying to make them feel bad behind the author's back, when really the author didn't do anything wrong. The reader didn't do anything wrong, either. At least up until they went and made the situation sound far more dramatic than it actually was while implying that authors on the website have a consistent problem with replying to comments. All the author did was reply to a commenter with an honest, calm explanation. The author even apologized despite having no need to. Who was it that went all "woe is me?" Well, certainly not the author in this case.
Anyways, my point is that readers are every bit as guilty of this as authors are, yet we only apply the standard to authors rather than readers. The little story I just told above isn't anywhere near the worst that I've seen from authors. Heck, part of the reason why I stopped replying to critical comments on stories was because, the vast majority of the time that I tried to explain myself to somebody, all it did was start a giant pile of steaming shit with the commenters accusing me of being incapable of handling criticism. Even if you point out that they are just straight-up wrong about something, perhaps because they misread or skipped a chapter without realizing it, then they make it sound like they're being attacked and like the author is the one at fault. That's why I always let other readers call these sorts of people out on their shit instead of doing it myself, because doing it myself only gets me attacked with people flailing all over the place going "woe is me." Heck, one time I told a guy who left a homophobic comment on my story that it was okay to drop it, but that he should never tell any author (not just me) to not write what they want to write. That's pretty fair, right? "Hey, it's alright if you don't like my story, but I hope you don't seriously tell other authors to not create the stories that they want to create." That, at least as far as I'm concerned, is perfectly fair. How did they reply? By attacking my character, telling me I'm incapable of handling criticism, and that I'm not as good as I think I am. And that's not the first time it happened. It's happened a lot to me and other authors. That's why I'm against stuff like replying to reviews, even though in the above case, such a shit fest in the comments can lead to the person in question leaving a negative review with ill intent that could be called out in a comment to the review. It could help, but all it would do is continue the cycle of shit flinging. All it does is stir the pot of shit and make the place stink. Maybe if readers stopped throwing themselves all around the place like they're in some Shakespearean tragedy, though, then it would be better.
And just as a final note on the "upsetting readers does far more damage than upsetting authors" thing: I've seen dozens of readers over the last three years quit writing web novels completely because they didn't know why they were getting negative ratings or who was leaving them. I've seen 0 readers stop reading web novels because an author was mad at them. There are thousands of new, potential readers for every reader you might lose on a story. There aren't thousands of new, potential authors for every author you lose due to negativity. So, again. If we're going to hold authors to high standards and tell them to grow a thicker skin, then I damn well believe we should be applying the same to readers.
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