Twitter is expanding its test of the downvote feature on tweets to a much larger audience.
The Big Tech company gave a select number of users the option to downvote in 2021, and it is now expanding those downvoting options on a global scale, a decision the company hopes will improve the conversation quality on social media.
“We learned a lot about the types of replies you don’t find relevant and we’re expanding this test,” Twitter tweeted Thursday. “More of you on web and soon iOS and Android will have the option to use reply downvoting.”
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We’ve been testing how we can surface the most relevant replies within Tweets with the use of downvoting on replies. As we’re expanding the experiment to a global audience, we want to share a little about what we have learned thus far!
? https://t.co/wM0CpwRgo6— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) February 3, 2022
The number of downvotes will not be visible to the public and likes will operate as the equivalent of upvotes, Twitter said.
The majority of users said they clicked the downvote in cases where the content was either offensive or irrelevant to the actual tweet, Twitter said. The downvote was also a tool for users to declare content they didn’t want to see and reported “improves the quality of conversations” on Twitter.
Twitter began initial tests of the downvote button in July of last year in hopes of understanding “the types of replies you find relevant in a convo, so we can work on ways to show more of them.”
Twitter is not the first company to implement the feature. Reddit and Youtube have had downvote options on their website for several years. However, Youtube began hiding the number of dislikes on its videos in November due to people organizing campaigns to “bomb” channels and videos with dislikes. The decision was criticized by Youtube’s co-founder Jawed Karim, who said that the number removal is a “universally disliked change” that removes the ability for consumers to identify bad or low-quality content.
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Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki defended the decision in a Jan. 25 update, saying that dislike counts were “harming parts of our ecosystem through dislike attacks as people actively worked to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos.”
Facebook has considered incorporating a downvote button but has not implemented it. The company experimented with up and downvotes in comments in April 2021.
