Twitter begins global rollout of downvote button test

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(Pocket-lint) – If you’re lucky, you might have seen the downvote reply option on Twitter recently.

Considered an experimental feature, Twitter began testing it in 2021. Now, the social network is rolling out the downvote option across the world as a test.

Initially, the feature was given to a select group of web users. But it is currently expanding to iOS and Android users. Twitter downvotes are different from Reddit downvotes – in that the upvote and downvote totals are hidden from the public on Twitter. In fact, downvotes are used by Twitter to determine which replies it shows users. According to Twitter’s tests so far, users tend to reject replies they find offensive or irrelevant. “This experiment also revealed that downvoting is the most common way people use to flag content they don’t want to see,” Twitter said.

Keep in mind that Twitter also offers the option to mute a conversation or mark it as spam, but those toggles are buried under the drop-down menus.

We’ve learned a lot about the types of answers you don’t find relevant and we’re expanding this test –– more of you are on the web and soon iOS and Android will have the ability to downvote answers.

Downvotes are not public, but they will help inform us of what content people want to see. https://t.co/g8LcTpQqDv pic.twitter.com/wm5MmdR4Xh

– Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) February 3, 2022

Twitter believes that downvoting “improves the quality of conversations on Twitter”, which means that its downvoting feature could eventually become official – as a way to give feedback on content.

Let’s also not forget that YouTube recently downgraded dislikes, making the video vote tally private last November. Meanwhile, Facebook has moved forward with tests of negative vote .

Written by Maggie Tillman.