Twitter has rolled out its downvote button globally. The feature, which was previously only available to a small group of users, is now available to everyone. According to the company, this experimental feature has received positive feedback and has assisted them in determining what content users want to see on this platform. Twitter began testing downvotes with web users in 2021, and the microblogging site is now planning to make the feature available to iOS and Android users as well.
Initially, Twitter displayed various downvoting options. It included both upvote and downvote buttons so that users could see which was the most popular for which content. Thumbs up and thumbs down buttons were also shown to some of the testers.
The majority of people used the downvote button when they found a tweet offensive or irrelevant, according to the study. According to Twitter, “this experiment also revealed that downvoting is the most commonly used way for people to flag content they don’t want to see.”
However, Twitter has confirmed that it will not display downvote counts on tweets and the data will be used by the platform to improve users’ experience. YouTube also took a similar initiative recently and started hiding public dislike counts on videos across its site to prevent dislike attacks or harassment for smaller creators. The company said that this will promote “respectful interactions between viewers and creators.”
The downvote button “improves the quality of conversations on Twitter,” according to Twitter, which is why it is being made available to a wider audience. This also suggests that the social media behemoth may make this a permanent feature for users in the future.
A dislike or downvote button is not available on other popular social media platforms such as Instagram. You can choose to hide Like counts and comments on the platform. The downvote feature was tested by Facebook in 2018, but it was not made permanent. Reddit users have the ability to upvote or downvote any piece of content on the site.