Twitter begins testing Reddit-like downvote button on iOS | Engadget

Some Twitter customers on iOS may see a brand new button that appears like Reddit’s downvote button in individuals’s replies. That’s a part of the social community’s newest experimental function designed to offer it extra perception on what sort of replies customers discover related in a dialog. According to Twitter Support’s announcement, the objective is to have the ability to collect sufficient knowledge, so the platform can work on methods to floor extra related responses. In lengthy threads, as an example, the very best replies do not at all times present up instantly and is likely to be buried beneath tons of different individuals’s tweets.

The random testers who get the function may see totally different variations of it. Some may even see upvote and downvote buttons, whereas others may solely see a downvote button proper subsequent to Twitter’s coronary heart/like choice. A 3rd model will present testers thumbs up and down buttons as a substitute. The variety of downvotes a reply will get is not going to be seen to the general public, and customers’ downvotes will probably be seen to them alone. Meanwhile, upvotes will present up as likes. 

At the second, votes will not change the order of responses just like how Reddit buries replies that get a ton of downvotes. As Twitter User Researcher Cody Elam explains in a sequence of tweets, the experiment’s goal is not to disgrace customers, however to offer “people the power to privately voice their opinion on the quality of replies” and to offer the corporate a “more nuanced feedback.” He added: “We’re hoping to learn more about the quality of replies that people vote on and if voting is a feature that people find valuable.”

This is not the primary time Twitter began testing the Reddit-like function. A number of months in the past, the social community began experimenting with Facebook-style emoji reactions that additionally included upvote and downvote buttons.