“I do wonder about the wisdom of ratings in places like YouTube. The problem with allowing ratings is that organized mobs of activists can promote certain sites or systematically deface the reputation of other videos by consistently giving it low ratings.”

Something like that has long been an issue with Amazon reader reviews. To make sense of them, you have to kind of ignore the star ratings and make sense of why people like/dislike a book, read between the lines to figure out the agenda behind the opinion.

A less political version of this phenomenon is looking at the consumer electronics and software reviews and figure out how many reviews should be read as: “I was too stupid to figure out how to set it up/install it.”