Twitter has been reported to be actively expanding its upvote button testing to a select group of users around the world. Going into more detail, the company said that it was finally able to get “positive feedback” on its initial experiments, which were carried out in July last year. “We’ve learned a lot about the types of responses you don’t think are relevant, and we’re expanding this test – more of you will be able to downvote tweets through the social media web client, as well as iOS and Android versions coming soon,” – the official statement of the company says.
It is also important to mention that the company has stated that, as before, the number of downvotes received for an answer will not be visible to the public. The negative votes of users will be visible only to them. In any case, it is important to recall that in the first round of tests, Twitter initially offered different options for “negative assessment”. Some saw the up and down buttons, while other users only saw the down button next to the like option. However, in version 3 of this test, users began to notice thumbs up and down buttons instead.
We learned a lot about the types of replies you don’t find relevant and we’re expanding this test –– more of you on web and soon iOS and Android will have the option to use reply downvoting.
Downvotes aren’t public, but they’ll help inform us of the content people want to see. https://t.co/g8LcTpQqDv pic.twitter.com/wm5MmdR4Xh
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) February 3, 2022
Anyway, so far, Twitter hasn’t said if the new global benchmarks will offer the same options. In any case, Twitter has already reported that the vast majority of users “clicked on the down arrow…because the response was perceived as offensive, or because they found it inappropriate, or both.” The company added that the “downvote” option has also become the most commonly used way for people to flag content they don’t want to see. By the way, one of the clearest examples of this is the Reddit platform, which has used negative votes since its launch in 2005.
The social network Facebook tested the negative votes feature in the same way back in 2018, but as a result, as we can see, this did not become something permanent. Well, Instagram, meanwhile, just allows users to hide likes in order to relieve some of the negative pressure present on the platform. So if you have long wanted to be able to express your disagreement on Twitter with the help of dislikes, then very soon the moment will come.
