Chances are if you're reading this, you're either happy with the new like/dislike system or raging furiously about how I've ruined everything good about the site while trying to find my address to send me pitchforks in the mail. So, I thought I'd explain things a little bit, and show you my justifications for the redesign.

First of all, how does the new system work? Well it's pretty simple, it's basically the same as Youtube/Reddit. You now can only like or dislike a story without any of the in betweens. But knighty! I want to vote stories at 4.5! :(:( Well that's great, and in an ideal world that would work. But there's many reasons it DOESN'T work at all online.

1. A 3.5 to one person is a 4.5 to another

2. (Literally) 70%+ of ratings on Fimfiction are 5 stars.

What this means is that your genuine and hard thought out 4.5 vote is utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things. By limiting it to "like" and "dislike", everyone can vote on those with much clearer discretion that a 10 point system, and showing them numerically at all time helps prevent thinks like vote bombing since it's not as if those likes magically disappear like your rating does in a star system. If you like a story, you like it. If you disliked it, you dislike it. Under the hood, the calculations for the best stories are largely the same so if you go to view the top stories you'll basically see exactly the same as you did before.

As far as the conversion goes, all 2.5+ ratings were converted to thumbs up, and the rest are thumbs down.

Hope this cleared things up for people.

Now feel free to unleash your unrelenting rage upon me.

edit: And since I forgot to thank him in the 5k stories post, thanks so much to Apo for being a great server admin and helping me out loads with the backend as well as hosting the site!