If you’ve seen the choice to downvote replies on Twitter, you’re not alone. The experimental characteristic, which Twitter began testing final 12 months, is now being proven to a worldwide viewers, says the company.

The choice to downvote was initially given to a choose group of internet customers, however Twitter says it’s going to quickly be increasing the characteristic to iOS and Android customers as properly. Unlike on websites like Reddit, whole tallies for upvotes and downvotes aren’t public, however are being utilized by Twitter behind the scenes to tweak what replies it exhibits customers.

The firm mentioned outcomes of the experiment to this point discovered that customers downvoted replies they discovered offensive or irrelevant. “This experiment also revealed that downvoting is the most frequently used way for people to flag content they don’t want to see,” mentioned Twitter. Presumably, that is as a substitute of muting a dialog or flagging it as spam or irrelevant — choices that Twitter at present buries inside unwieldy dropdown menus.

Twitter’s conclusion to this point is that entry to downvoting “improves the quality of conversations on Twitter,” suggesting the characteristic may finally graduate to develop into a everlasting addition to the positioning.

Downvotes and dislikes are a easy manner for customers to provide suggestions on on-line content material, however they will also be problematic. They can be utilized in campaigns of focused harassment, for instance, and in the event that they grew to become a part of Twitter’s algorithm they may very well be used to silence dissenting opinion.

In the previous, YouTube has discovered dislikes so problematic that it made the vote-count personal as of November final 12 months. Facebook, in the meantime, has experimented with downvotes, however by no means carried out them, preferring to initially solely give customers the choice to “like” content material earlier than increasing the vary of reactions utilizing emoji.