Agreed. But....does anyone actually look at it to determine whether they will click on the thread? Personally, I don't.
You can rate your own threads. You can change your rating. You can create multiple ID's and rate a thread more than once. The followers of an ET member can gang up on you and give low ratings or high ratings to their leader. This only applied to Atticus and since he is gone that problem is solved
There is actually someone on this site that follows ALL of my posts and one stars me with several accounts. If you look in economics where people generally do not rate peoples posts, You will see everything I have posted, is one starred. I notice other people too that have perfectly good topics getting 1 starred also no matter what they post or where they post it. I've noticed other people getting 1 starred on everything they post (sure some deserve the 1 star ratings, but some don't) Especially if its a legitimate topic. This has only happened in the last 4 or 5 months.
Lets use Barons Moving Forward: Your Opinion of ET thread as an example how bad the rating system is. So far that thread has 181 votes with a 2.83 out of 5 rating. That's 56.6% and would be considered an F in school. The founder of ET gets an F for one of his threads. LOL That thread is dominated by less than 10 members, yet it gets 181 votes. Wouldn't it be better if the other 171 voters would reply to the OP with some feedback instead of giving his thread an F? How many of those 181 votes are from the same IP address?