there is more to life than strangers massaging each others egos by having a cyber love in. why do you need to be rated? the answer is because it help fence sitter like you to give a bad mark without the guilt

It doesn't. Unless you feel that having less than a 100% rating is negative. It's not. A somewhat useful by itself gives you a 75%, while a not useful gives a 50%. If you get a 75% (somewhat) and the next rating is 100%, the average for the answer becomes an 87% (splitting the difference). 75% is not negative, but it does bring down your average if your average is over 75%, so in that sense it counts as a negative. For newer users, the ratings count a lot because individual ratings swing your overall average more drastically. For example: early in my participation, I had a B+ average overall, and one 50% (not useful) dropped it to a C-, at the time, I didn't really care about it. As I continued answering I watched the rating climb to a B+ again, went to bed one night and woke up the next morning to an A. That's when I got interested in what it took to get and maintain a high rating like an A+. I got there within a day, only to have it knocked down by a single 50% to a B+. Since I was trying to figure out how ratings are affected, I figured out how to find the answer that was "down" rated, to see why it was downrated. I found it to be an unfair rating, and felt a little miffed. Recently, though, I have recieved a couple of these 50%ers, and they have not affected my overall rating at all. It's a numbers game to some extent. If you plug in enough useful answers and they are rated appropriately, you could concievably reach a point where you would literally have to sabotage yourself by endless bad answering to ruin your high ratings. Conversely, if you start out with dismal ratings and your total number of ratings is few, just about every good rating has a dramatic affect on your overall. If you start low, and continue too long that way, say several hundred bad ratings, you could concievably reach a point of no recovery for all practical purposes. So "Somewhat Useful" only counts as a negative toward your average, and becomes less and less important the further you get into the game.