I've always thought smaller scales were better. I think asking people to rate something on a 1-5 scale is optimistic. A 1-10 scale is simply insanity. No one, w

I've always thought smaller scales were better. I think asking people to rate something on a 1-5 scale is optimistic. A 1-10 scale is simply insanity. No one, without substantial effort, can reasonably rank something from 1-10... even if they think they can. I once had someone try to convince me that they could rank the attractiveness of girls accurately on a scale of 1-100, differentiating between every point on the scale. I don't think anyone would argue that that's insane. I feel the same way about 1-10 scales. It simply isn't possible. When a particular rating is really important, I say use 1-4. I think preventing people from picking a middle answer will help get more honest opinions. If it's an issue about which you can truly be apathetic, 1-3. Hacker News seems to do quite well with a scale of 1-1 on submissions, or perhaps we should call it a scale of apathy-opinion. Maybe for YouTube they could count opinion votes when someone watches the same video twice or uses the embed/share feature. If someone watches a video but never shares it or watches it again, then I think it's fair to say they were apathetic about it.