Voting and/or Rating Threads

Which would be the reason why you would have the ratings turned <b>off</b>. People are going to say what they say, and it's not like any one person owns a thread - so therefore, there's really no incentive. We're not talking karma here. We're not talking about rating specific posts. We're talking about rating an entire thread based upon the quality of its posts. This rating would not affect the thread - it would just be used as a criteria to sort threads <b>if the viewer wanted to see the ratings</b>. Don't like 'em? Turn it off. Want to see 'em? Turn it on. With only a single vote happening per person, the ratings couldn't be stuffed.

I really don't see anything negative that could come from this. There would be no incentive to rank a thread, nor would there be any incentive to post there. Why would people pander to some crowd? As we all know, we individually rank people based upon the merits of their comments - whether or not they're participating in a "highly rated thread" would be ignored.

To put it another way: I simply do not understand your stance. Please clarify.