Why have ratings?

In theory they make sense, but in practice they don't seem to work. Most stories get 10s out of politeness, or 1s out of spite, nobody is going to take the time and effort to work out what stories are 7s and what are 6s and it's all subjective anyway. Let's take a page from Facebook and either you like it or you don't, with maybe a ticker for times the story was visited. Nobody even rated my latest additions and I was quite proud of those and would have like to have known if anyone even read them.