We had a system like that when I was a manager. It was anonymous but I could usually still tell who it was based off the writing style on the comments or the fact that they were complaining about things that they had already brought up to me. I didn't retaliate against anyone though. Usually I agreed with them and they were complaining about things I had no control over

I can confirm these are definitely confidential. In so far as your name isn't on it. My place shows us the best and the worst comments

However we can usually tell who said what and me and my manager play a game of who said what each time it comes around.

Depends on the system! Even for anonymous polls, you still need to have unique links to ensure that people don't take it multiple times and bias the results. Even if it can track who has (not) answered the poll, it doesn't mean that the answers are traced back to you!

If they want they still can track you though, so this is why we need tools that we can verify how they work, e.g. open source services, maybe hosted on a external trusted provider etc

They stopped showing the number of thumbs down. They did not take away the thumbs down button.

While true, what's the difference? Do we know that they use thumbs down in anything anymore?

Yeah it's still better than FB which doesn't even have a thumbs down. Fortunately I'm only on FB for my job, not being able to downvote makes me crazy.

Five star rating system was dumb because almost every rating was 1 or 5 stars. It was right to replace with a thumbs up/thumbs down system.

That assumes that the only use for ratings is for averaging the aggregate votes across all users. Nope. Sometimes for a specific user they like to be able to see the granularity of their own ratings for their own use. And even if it is a public aggregated thing the rating service can still treat all 1-2 stars as downvotes and 4-5 stars as upvotes while it's easier to use the simpler algorithms, but to still store the more precise data for analyzing correlations at greater detail.

Big tech covered the world in trillion-parameter AI models and couldn't even figure out what to do with 5-star ratings differently from upvotes/downvotes? It's ridiculous.

Can confirm this. I created a 5 Star system for my recipe app. Had the feature for a year, I didn't use it once. I just couldn't justify the difference between a 4 or 5 Star. Or 2 and 3 Star.

Switched to dislike, like, love buttons. Nice and discrete. Been using it for weeks now.

Users up voting and down voting controls what's get popular, by not being transparent about it YouTube can promote crap no one wants to see.

It is just another form of enshitification.

That’s the fifth step.

It's unreliable from what I have read

It estimates dislike amount. I might be wrong but the way it works is that it puts likes from everyone, dislikes from ones who has this extension and an overall view count, mixes this data up in a formula and gives an output of approximate dislike count. Factual count is only known to creators.

Here's what a video page looked like back in 2003:

Early on yeah, they replaced it with the thumbs up/down system since most star ratings were 1 or 5.