I just get a good laugh when ever someone brings up their ratings/rankings here because they are completely dismissed as garbage and useless immediately. Regardless of the minor issues involved in their ratings, they do give a decent "snapshot" (with a large sample size) of how the anime community looks at a show.
It's not the "anime ratings gospel" at all, just a good reference point.
But you see, it's actually not a good reference point.
There are so many great shows out there that get overlooked or underrated on that site (or any anime ratings site for that matter) because people score the show low after dropping it after a few episodes, or don't watch it at all due to its low popularity.
Here's Majin Bone's score on MAL.
6.86 among an average of 1,484 people.
By this "reference point", this show doesn't seem to be very good, and there're probably much better shows on the site that have much higher scores and are much more popular.
Clearly, it's a show that's not worth people's time, right?
Well, I was recommended Majin Bone not by MAL, but by fellow GAF user Madp. He loved this show, and gave examples as to why he thought it was good. After being impressed by the show's use of CG (something that is usually a huge turn-off for me), I decided to make a watchbet with him. I went in the show with fairly mild expectations, wondering what made this show I've never heard of good enough for him to recommend.
It wasn't long before I found myself binge-watching it and making it one of my favourite shows of all time.
I would have missed out on so much had I dismissed the show based off MAL's "reference" point.
The reason why we dismiss MAL scores as garbage and useless is because you're not listening to people. You're listening to numbers. Sure, they may be representative of what the general anime community thinks of the show, but as others have said, it's not representative of the show's actual quality.