If you haven’t been to the YouTube website recently, you should because they have completely redesigned the video pages. The new design might load a little quicker on slow connections but it looks too minimal and even incomplete to me. Anyway, this story has nothing to do with the color scheme or the layout of the redesigned YouTube website – its about an extremely important feature that some feel has gone missing in the new design. YouTube (old) had a star rating system that would let anyone with a Google Account rate YouTube videos on 1-5 scale. This simple feature saved us from wasting countless hours on YouTube because if a video had low user ratings, you immediately knew it was not worth your time and you could skip to the next one. YouTube has now replaced the “star rating” system in the new design with a “Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down” rating system that gives you only two choices – you either like a video (5 stars) or you don’t (1 star). Most user prefer to see the ratings of a video before hitting the play button but for some unknown reason – may be to boost page views – YouTube is no longer displaying the ratings of videos on their pages. If you rate a video, the overall ratings appear but not otherwise. Fortunately, YouTube has not dropped the ratings completely and there’s a simply way by which you can see the ratings of any YouTube video without having to rate it. Just click the drop-down arrow next to “views” of any video and you’ll find what you are looking for. Alternatively, you may install these extensions for Chrome and Firefox and you’ll get the star ratings back in the main video page just like the good old YouTube design. An advantage with extensions is that they’ll add star ratings to videos displayed in the YouTube search results as well so they’re more handy.
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