You may soon see upvote and downvote buttons next to the Retweet and Like buttons on tweet replies.
2021 has proved to be a hectic year for Twitter’s development team. This time, the platform is functioning to implement something new to help determine what replies are and are not relevant to its online discussions.
Twitter May Be Borrowing One of Reddit’s Core Features
Twitter is considering adding upvotes and downvotes to replies to your tweets. the corporate announced that it’s beginning a “small research experiment” to check the doubtless upcoming feature.
Some of you on iOS may see different options to up or down vote on replies. We're testing this to understand the types of replies you find relevant in a convo, so we can work on ways to show more of them.
Your downvotes aren’t public, while your upvotes will be shown as likes. pic.twitter.com/hrBfrKQdcY
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 21, 2021
It looks like upvotes and downvotes on Twitter will function very similarly to it Reddit—the idea is that you can upvote tweets you wish or accept as accurate with and downvote those you dislike or are con of.
Only you’ll be ready to see your downvotes, while your upvotes will contribute to the tweet’s like count. Twitter also went out of its thanks to emphasizing that the downvote option isn’t a dislike button:
This isn’t quite a dislike button. During this research experiment, the thumbs down icon may be a downvote that lets us know that you think the reply isn’t relevant to the conversation. We want to understand the kinds of replies you are doing and do not find relevant during a convo [conversation].
Votes won’t change the order in which replies are displayed on the app. you’ll also find that you simply and another user within the test group have different icons for the upvote and downvote buttons.
For some, the icons for the upvote and downvote are up and down arrows enclosed during a circle. For others, they instead appear as thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons. This is often presumably just a visible test for the UI design. The feature works an identical way regardless.
At the time of writing, the test is restricted to users on iOS devices.
The Response to Twitter’s Upvote and Downvote Experiment
Twitter’s proposal to feature upvote and downvote buttons was met with primarily negative criticism. It didn’t take long in the least for users to pepper the replies to the company’s announcement tweet.
The most prevalent concern seems to be that users are convinced that the new feature will only allow hateful users to harass people anonymously, which is, quite frankly, a reasonably reasonable assumption to form.
Twitter has had a touch of an underlying lousy reputation since its inception, just because the platform’s character allows you to throw almost any comment out into the open internet. Instantly, and it is easy to cover your identity behind a username if you so choose.
Users also took the chance to suggest other features that they think should be added instead, sort of a tweet gallery for artists/photographers or an edit button—which may be a request that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey refuses to grant.
But the most straightforward part of all this could be Reddit’s response. The forum site replied to Twitter with a meme, captioned “Interesting.” At the time of writing, the reply has fourfold the number of likes that the first tweet has.
