In March of last year, Twitter began experimenting with a downvote option and other new reactions. In November, the social media behemoth began conducting more extensive public tests, and it appears to be broadly rolling out to all users around the world at this time. Twitter is polling all of its users in an effort to better understand their habits and opinions while the downvote feature is still in the testing phase.
Expect the new downvote functionality on Twitter to function as intended, as the company has revealed plans to roll it out worldwide. Twitter has stated that “this experiment also demonstrated that downvoting is the most often utilized approach for individuals to mark content they don’t want to view,” and that doing so will help the social media platform fine-tune its algorithm.
The rationale behind implementing downvotes is that they “increase the quality of conversations on Twitter,” indicating that they may one day become a fully functional, in-built element of the service.
All iOS and Android users should now have access to the updated feature. To make matters worse, not even the tweet’s creator will be able to see the number of downvotes it has received; only Twitter itself will have access to this information.
The ability to downvote digital content is valuable for expressing opinions and providing constructive criticism, but it also has the potential to create issues. YouTube eliminated the hate counter after discovering that it was being abused to harass and coerce content creators, but this raises new concerns about how users will be able to locate content that is actually valuable to them.
Google didn’t want to look at other possibilities that would help reduce harassment and bullying in the workplace. As an alternative, Facebook introduced reactions a few years ago and hasn’t shared many studies on how emojis aid people in reacting to published items.
