As petty as it is, something deep down gets me a little moody at poor ratings. Mostly because I don't believe in an abstract artistic opinion being expressed numerically; like some kind of snooty jouranlism opinion generator. At least I'm confident enough in my art to not let it get to me. But what bugs me, is I've seen fellow artists get upset about their art being crucified without any genuine critique. Anyways, I think it imparts a bad notion. It gives the rater a position of power they don't deserve (because much of them are users who have posted, created, and contributed absolutely nothing to this website, and very likely to this whole world), and it bums out the artists who worked hard on their artwork only to have someone look at it and slap it with a poor rating.

It's funny, because I've already heard the argument "That's what leaving reviews is for", but that's assuming people aren't going to extend their asshole jurisdiction to the reviews section just the same. Most reviews I've seen offer either nothing constructive whatsoever, or it's just a one word review like "bad" or "meh". So Just by having a numerical system, you've devided the website into three groups: entitled jerks, entitled jerks who put in slightly more effort and think they're more important and interesting than the other jerks, and people who actually have things to say. And you can't even assume that the latter aren't going to be mean with their critique themselves, if they're around at all. You could also bring up voting power, but now you're leaving it to chance that the 1/3 of those people who actually give a damn actually see your artwork and critique it fairly. 

idk. This has probably been complained about a lot. I'm no designer obviously and it's easy to complain about these things, but I think it's pretty counter productive. Destructive, even. I understand they're reworking the system as we speak, so yay. Y'know, one thing that deviant art does with critiques is a minimum character limit, which I quite like. It means that if you don't have anything to say, you simply cannot. It also means that if they're just being mean and post something like "this is gaygaygaygaygay" a hundered times, you can just flag it as spam as apposed to just saying the review is negetive (which btw, does that even do anything??)

yeh.

-Edit 2/14/15-
Lemme also just add that it's been pretty cool getting feedback on this entry, and how civil everyone is being even if they don't quite agree. I'm getting good impressions about the newgrounds community.