While I give "thanks" that thought is being put into improving this forum, I don't really "like" this change for a number of reasons which
@CAPSLOCKSTUCK has already enumerated.
I think that the tl;dr of it is that TPU is a discussion forum - it's not Stack Overflow. Discussion forums are by their nature a lot more freeform and often a lot more subjective than extremely focused sites like SO. In a discussion forum, there's a lot more back-and-forth between people, more like an actual face-to-face conversation between two people, than what you get on SO.
That also ties in to awarding "badges" or whatever we call them based on thanks/likes/ratings. It raises the possibility that someone who almost exclusively contributes highly-rated posts that are amusing, but not technical, in the e.g. motherboard section, ends up rated as a "Motherboard Master" or whatever it is.
Finally there's the News section, which is the part of the site that I almost only ever visit. How does one rate and/or quantify posts there, especially since that section generally ends up being a circlejerk where anti-Intel/anti-NVIDIA posts are upvoted to high heaven while more moderate posts, often based on factual analysis, are ignored? If the simple solution is to exclude News threads fom badge calculation, then that doesn't seem fair, because I'm pretty sure I know more about hardware than many of the posters there... some of whom have various "Master" badges.
And the rate vs like thing is pissing me off. WHICH ONE DO I USE???