Twitter Prolongates Its Downvote Test to Learn More about Its Users

Likes have always been great, and dislikes, in many situations, even better. But their effect is ambivalent. While Facebook and other Meta projects, as well as Telegram, implement diverse reactions to let users express what they think, YouTube has already hidden dislikes. As for Twitter, it’s just testing the downvote feature, and the test will last longer than expected.

Those select users who are now testing the feature see the arrow down between the “Like” and “Share” buttons. Unlike the reactions on Facebook, there will be no ambiguity about these downvotes. It’s not about readers being upset or angry about the fact described in the tweet. It’s always a reaction to the tweet itself, indicating that readers actively dislike it.

To avoid controversies like those around YouTube, Twitter makes its downvotes hidden from the start. They will only be seen to the author of the tweet, the sender, and Twitter itself. The study Twitter is conducting now is taken to tell whether these downvotes will improve the quality of communication and make Twitter less toxic (or maybe more, on the contrary). It’s not clear what these downvotes will mean for the author of the tweet. The most logical option is to have an AI-assisted abuse team that will review tweets with a certain number of downvotes and block them or bans their authors.

The experiment was to be over by now, but Twitter decided to expand it. Downvotes will appear on both web versions and mobile apps for iOS and Android. First, they will become available to a certain number of random users, and then, if the experiment succeeds, to everyone.

Do you already have the opportunity to downvote tweets? Do you use it? How do you think it will affect the future of Twitter? Won’t it result in emerging of bot farms specializing in downvote attacks? Let’s speak what we think here in the comments!