Click Through Rate is the first ranking factor on Google, but you will not get your website ranked for long time.

No CTR makes no difference.

CTR is a ranking factor when it comes to top 3 positions.

I don't think CTR is a ranking factor. Outside of page 1, basically every other site has about a zero CTR and barely any impressions. In many cases, not enough impressions to generate any meaningful data.

What I do think could be a negative signal is a really bad CTR for a site on page one. If you are ranking in the top 3 and getting almost no clicks, that could be a signal to the ranking algorithm that maybe your site should not be there.

So you start a new forum thread expecting everyone to finally agree.

Well, the Google`s own assumption is that '…searching users are often the best judges of relevance, so that if they select a particular search result, it is likely to be relevant, or at least more relevant than the presented alternatives.'

Given this, I`d say that the CTR is not a direct ranking factor, but indeed it may have a noticeable impact on the results ranking on page one. Commonly, you`d say that the higher position would presuppose more clicks on average, but sometimes it goes just the other way around. I believe it`s about how helpful and appealing your website looks in the SERP - the high CTR may convince Google that some result ranking #3 is actually more relevant according to the searchers` actions than your #1 result, that`s where it may hurt your rankings due to just improving your competitor`s.

So it`s not like low CTR (out of context) will impact your rank negatively, it`s more like - high CTR may benefit your bottom SERP-neighbor.

as far as I know the click rate is an indicator of popular blog and hence, this is potential quality indicators for google reviews, but these numbers may also be normalization based on the location of the page as a page appearing on the top results will be more click than the page displayed at the bottom of the page.