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Twitter has been testing a downvote feature with select users since last summer. Now, the app is expanding the feature globally.
Last July, Twitter announced that some iOS users would see options to upvote and downvote replies to certain tweets.
Unlike the like button (or a frequently-requested dislike button), the vote options are private and exist purely to help Twitter better understand which replies are relevant to a conversation. Twitter also reassured users at the time that their votes won’t affect the order in which replies appear under tweets.
The test has seemingly been a success, and Twitter is now expanding the feature to make downvoting available to more iOS, Android and desktop users globally.
Twitter‘s Safety Account (@TwitterSafety) released a thread explaining more about the downvote experiment and what the app has learnt about the feature so far.
According to the social media site, the majority of users who hit the orange downvote arrow did so because they found the reply they were reacting to offensive or irrelevant to the tweet it sat under.
Twitter also revealed that downvoting became the most popular way for users to flag content they didn’t want to see. This isn’t all that surprising considering the downvote button sits right under the tweet, while other options, such as report, mute, block and ‘Not interested in this Tweet’, are two clicks away under the option menu and often require users to answer further questions about the tweet.
Lastly, Twitter revealed that people who have tested the feature agreed it had improved the quality of their conversations on the app, so we aren’t surprised the app is expanding the experiment further by bringing the feature to more users.
Of course, Twitter isn’t the first app to implement downvotes, with sites like Reddit and YouTube also having rolled out the feature in the past.
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