ratings - What are the ramifications of removing voting down (thumbs down)?

Remember when Youtube removed their 5-star rating system in favor of their current thumbs up/down system? From their statistics, they concluded that because there were too many choices, people ended up only using one choice - the full 5 star rating:

Now they boiled it down to two choices: thumbs up and down.

Can we take this a step further? How about we boil it down to only 1 choice? Remove the thumbs down and only have the thumbs up.

• By reducing choices, does it speed up the user's execution time?


• Will the effective rating of the ecosystem remain the same? For example, I have only 3 items in my ecosystem to rate. In a thumbs up + down system, the ratings could be +10, +5, and -3. If we were to switch to a thumbs up-only system, would the ratings naturally converge to +13, +8, and 0?


• Are negative ratings really that useful? There exist many successful sites whose content is rated on a positive scale. Examples include, Yelp, Amazon, and Newegg. I think negative ratings could draw too much attention to bad content. It is arguable that bad content should be ignored. Aren't Internet users trying to quickly find good content by looking at high ratings? How would drawing undue attention to bad content by marking it red help the user find good content?


• Does getting negative ratings discourage a user from further participation? I remember back when I started using Digg, my first few comments got negative votes. It appears that one must make a snarky remark or pun to garner the approval of the Digg community at the time. This discouraged me from ever posting on Digg again. Yes, it taught me never to make comments too serious, but it didn't encourage me to further participate in a manner that would appease the masses.

Answer

I believe having a negative voting is useful!

Normally most of the content is rated positively, but there are situations where the content is most definitely bad and by voting negative you give that input to other viewers (take Stack Exchange's sites for example, the up/down system is effective IMO). People like to voice their opinions.

It does affect me when I get negatives, I think there may be somekind of test/study already made about this (I will have to search for it), but it can also be treated as another challenge: how to produce a voting system, where the negatives don't discourage the users?

I understand your point of view, when changing from a five choice system (the stars) down to a two choice system (or one)... You would like to simplify it even more, but careful, to simplify more can be harmful, simple is good but in my opinion too simple isn't that good.

It may speed the user interaction if you have fewer options, but I suggest you make this exercise (and this is the real challenge) how to improve the usability of my voting system with this amount of choices?

Finally, don't be surprised if in the future sites like youtube.com introduce more choices. A choice is very valuable and removing most just for the sake of simplicity may be a bad thing.