They stopped showing the number of thumbs down. They did not take away the thumbs down button.

While true, what's the difference? Do we know that they use thumbs down in anything anymore?

Can confirm this. I created a 5 Star system for my recipe app. Had the feature for a year, I didn't use it once. I just couldn't justify the difference between a 4 or 5 Star. Or 2 and 3 Star.

Switched to dislike, like, love buttons. Nice and discrete. Been using it for weeks now.

Five star rating system was dumb because almost every rating was 1 or 5 stars. It was right to replace with a thumbs up/thumbs down system.

That assumes that the only use for ratings is for averaging the aggregate votes across all users. Nope. Sometimes for a specific user they like to be able to see the granularity of their own ratings for their own use. And even if it is a public aggregated thing the rating service can still treat all 1-2 stars as downvotes and 4-5 stars as upvotes while it's easier to use the simpler algorithms, but to still store the more precise data for analyzing correlations at greater detail.

Big tech covered the world in trillion-parameter AI models and couldn't even figure out what to do with 5-star ratings differently from upvotes/downvotes? It's ridiculous.