I suppose so, when talking about whether or not the reader likes the story, 1-5 stars does seem a little unfitting. Reviews is another thing entirely, but that is a good point. But even, so I don't see why changing it is necessary. While it is clearer to tell someone likes the story if they hit "like" it would be the same for "five stars". You just need to realize that if someone rates it five stars, they like it, and if they leave a five star review, they think the story itself is good and others will like it too. You can just clarify those differences and leave the system as is. Changing the system just so it's more intuitive at first glance, is a massive waste of time, when all you have to do is tell people the differences. It may be more convenient, but then it's just up to Tony whether he's willing to sacrifice time for a minor convenience. He may have more important things to do as well.
Intuitiveness is important. It is a very important part of design. Don't just throw it away like that.
Though, this is for Tony to decide. If he doesn't change it, well, I don't think there would be any harm. I pretty much ignore the ratings in the first place. They are pretty much garbage to me.
But here we arrive at the same discussion of "what it is meant to be" and "what people use it for". Yeah like/dislike isn't meant to be a quality sign, but it'll end up just like one. That's the whole "people don't use the system the way it is meant to be" argument from your first paragraph in the opposite way. If you have like/dislike instead of 5stars it'll for most users "replace the rating system" which makes it a metric of quality.
It won't be just "a user just disliked the story out of personal interest" but end up as "a user disliked the story because it was shit".
The difference is like/dislike doesn't pretend to be one, unlike ratings. I also given you example about how people uses number of favorites and readers as an indication of quality (and there are actually sites where you can only decide based only on these metrics). They can be used but they, as well as like/dislike, might provide indications, and of course readers can use them to for that, but in their essence they don't measure quality . . . ratings however is supposed to measure quality, and fail at it.
I mean youtube makes it even easier with the bar, so you can see whether a video is good or bad just by the size of the different colors. Look down in the comment of disliked videos and you find a hundred comments about "the size of the bar" in there.
So yeah, the ratio isn't expressed as a number, but people still know, that "any good video" should have at least ten times the likes (depending on the channel size even 100 times) the likes. Any video with both numbers in the same range is easily seen as bad quality. People will adapt and whether they see a rating as bad, the number of 1stars as bad, or the number of dislikes as bad won't change the issue at heart.
I think you didn't get my point. You can if you look. I mean you can even look at how the ratings are distributed in SH, but my point is where the emphasis goes. You actually pointed out that the people has to look at the numbers and compare them. This the very same thing when you look at favorites or readers. You look at the numbers and do something with them to make your own judgement.
And also should mention that the ratio isn't the only thing that people would base it on but also the number of likes and dislikes. A video with almost the same ration of like and dislike but one has 100,000 like while the other only has 100, tells you something more that the ration indicates.
Ratings however gives you a single number like 4.7. What does that mean? Well, it supposed to mean that this story is of really really great quality.
See the difference on emphasis and how it affects how you perceive and do things?
Again, I won't even start with that discussion, because I don't even see any solution that would work.
For something to work, it shouldn't be "either stars or likes" but a system, that can combine those points together. The problem is that trolls will stay trolls and people still will play the system if it has any meaning. My personal idea would go more in the way of make the overall rating only based on reviews and have the like/dislike for chapters. So more or less combine both systems. But then trolls/bots would just go and dislike every chapter and you have 50 dislikes instead of one 1star rating. Or you get "it's meh" 2* reviews just for the sake of it.
Imho if you want a "user enjoyment metric" you need to have it together with a "quality metric" to stand apart. So in that case, likes/dislikes would stand against the "chapter favorites" we have now, while ratings need their work to do. Making a "quality score" with 5stars based solely on the reviews might work and give reviews more weight. But while it makes it easier to see whether those low ratings have a reason, it'll also invite all the more toxicity, double accounts and whatnot.
So yeah, I can't see a system that works fine, because that would have to be a whole behemoth of a system that also have to work more or less automatic. So to me, we would just rename the problem. Likes/dislikes will become the "quality" metric, because there aren't any stars... and people will still act the same way anyway.
Same with your arguments. They are sound in their core, but people won't listen to "dislikes/likes" says nothing about quality. Just like they didn't listen "ratings aren't meant for your likes/dislikes". If we change the system, we'll have the same discussion the other way round. Because it's less of a problem solving discussion and more of a "opinion on how to name things" discussion...
Well, the original poster, as I said before, doesn't really want to change the system because trolls are trolls but to reflect how people actually do things. This is what he thinks the main issue was. It is not so much as what works as to what fits better.
So what if they do use it? What is the problem there? If they use it as such, fine, but at least it doesn't pretend to be an actual measurement of quality like the rating does. No one could point at it that say it is erroneous because it is not measuring quality in the first place.
And user enjoyment metric? What garbage is that?
And it is not just naming. As I said before, like/dislike is not ratings with the middle options removed with like-5 star and dislike-1 star. It tells you a very different thing and ask something different from the readers. It presents its content in a very different way too. Just because they involve readers clicking on a number of selections to do their task doesn't mean they are the same with different names.
Though, if you still see all this differences as being cosmetic, i.e. just changing the names, well, agree to disagree.
And while I'm pretty much supportive in changing to a like/dislike system, if Tony decides to just keep the rating system, well, no problem. I pretty much adapted to the platform using my own techniques which amount to ignoring the ratings. I mean, I used fanfiction.net and fictionPress where rating and likes/dislikes (and review system) doesn't exist and I managed just fine, as well as other users apparently. If you want your fancy ratings, well, at least you could keep enjoying it.