Twitter confirmed testing upvote & downvote buttons for a tiny group of iOS users to highlight relevant comments on a long conversation. Upvotes and downvotes may appear in different styles for iOS users (up and down arrows, a heart icon, and a down arrow, and thumbs up and thumbs down icons).
The Twitter official tweet revealed that “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 conversation, so we can work on ways to show more of them. Your downvotes aren’t public, while your upvotes will be shown as likes”.
The goal of this new feature is to help twitter the sort of replies users feel relevant. Twitter user researcher Cody Elam says, “past studies determined that users believed replies that were informative, supportive, positive and funny were the “best” types of replies. However, some of the best replies wouldn’t surface quickly enough — an issue Twitter hopes to be able to address with an upvoting and downvoting feature”.
Twitter also shared the keynotes of this experiment in their official Twitter handle.
- This is just a research test right now.
- This is not a dislike button.
- Your downvotes are visible to you only.
- Votes won’t change the order of replies.
This data is expected to help twitter for improving the conversation ranking system.
