Without an accompanying review, does it say more about the rater or the rated?

My latest novel Streets of Nashville has been out for five months (since its release on 15 April 2025). Sometime last week, a one-star rating appeared on Amazon. Given that reviews have been good and ratings prior to last week have ranged from five stars to three, with five stars prominent, I expected the inevitable one-star rating to incite a little feeling of devastation.

But it didn’t. I had a quick thought of Well, damn, but that was it. Had the rating been accompanied by a review explaining why the rater disliked it to that extreme, I would’ve paid more attention (and probably would’ve felt more of that expected devastation), but the idea popped into my mind that without a review to explain the rating, the one star seems to me to say more about the rater than it does about the writer or the book.

Sometime before this, A Twilight Reel received a one-star rating/review on Goodreads. I was actually interested in what the review had to say about the book. Although it made some interesting claims, it remained too vague. If, as the review said, I never met a cliché I didn’t like, then I would’ve benefited from a couple of examples. The rating/review stayed up just a day or two and then disappeared. I don’t know what’s up with that.