I'd like to clarify that the sentiment that sparked this discussion was not just "the ratings are confusing", it was "the ratings are confusing AND abused". It's not just that people found the cookie condescending; people used it to be condescending, and people knew that, and some people refused to use it because of that. It's not just that no one could tell what the facehugger was or was unsure how to take it because it was a creepy facehugger; it's that people were using it passive-aggressively.
I half-jokingly proposed in the discussion that we just get rid of all ratings, but obviously that's not actually fair to you guys and would let a few assholes ruin everything for everyone. This whole discussion was geared with you guys in mind, both in terms of an easy to navigate, easy-to-understand Iwaku as well as one that doesn't encourage people to be snarky bitches without even having to post. I know it seems like we took away a toy and you're being punished for what other people did, but that's not really the idea here.
The other half of the discussion involved the fact that people were requesting more ratings, especially ratings like on Amor that could be roleplay-applicable. Unfortunately with the way our site is set up, implementing a split system like Amor's with forum-specific ratings would break stuff; a ton of your ratings would disappear, things might get borked, etc. In lieu of that, we decided to add just two that were applicable both to RP posts AND the OOC areas of the site: a laughing one and one to express sadness.
The bulk of THAT discussion involved ideas for how to express sadness without making room for it to be used passive-aggressively. I'm serious. We spent more time on that one conversation point than anything else, because the whole point was to try and avoid that in the first place. Spite ratings are a more frequent issue than you might think.
I will add that while I personally do not care much about having any ratings beyond "Like" and maybe "Thank", and was more a yes-man to this suggestion--although I do like streamlining, because less clutter IS more attractive to new people even when we all love and understand a thing--it is rather disheartening to see this kind of backlash to something that came from a long and thoughtful discussion to try and improve the site experience for our users, especially over a feature so relatively small and superfluous in the scheme of things. I'm not saying that anyone can't disagree with the decision or that you're not entitled to your feelings on the subject. Pleasing everyone would be impossible, and we know that! But I hope that you can all understand that this was not done because of a vocal minority bullying us into something, or because newbies are ignorant and we don't have resources to explain things to them, but that we genuinely care and strive to actively address site issues after comprehensively considering all the facts.
Why not just go all the way and adopt Discord's post reaction system, where you rate a lost using one out of every available emoji?
With the current rating system we have, that would cause a huge block under posts and make the site awful to navigate. We would have to find an addon that allowed for this new system, if it even exists AND is compatible with our site build, and then add however much it costs for initial licensing and then updates to our yearly quota for donations. That's a lot of effort into research, testing, and, and $ for something that can be accomplished now by just posting an actual reply for free. It also would likely kill all existing ratings and I feel like that would quite justifiably upset people a lot more than removing two ratings has.
