As soon as people started sharing their thoughts on feelings on various social media platforms that they were using on a more or less regular basis, being able to react to these thoughts became an essential aspect of the aforementioned platforms. This started out with things like likes and favorites, although YouTube stuck with a starred rating system for a little while. Eventually, even being able to like something became a little old fashioned, and Facebook eventually moved on to reactions so that it could expand interactions that users could engage in.
Reddit managed to take a different approach, and it has stuck with that approach for the most part. On Reddit, you can either upvote something or downvote it, and this will impact how visible it is if you were sorting comments or posts according to that. It turns out that Twitter is also experimenting with a downvote button which is something that a lot of users have been requesting since the only interactions you can make right now allow you to like a tweet or reply to it.
Twitter has been doing a lot to allow statistics to reflect the actual sentiments that people are feeling towards a post or comment. Making quote retweets visible has made it far clearer to understand whether or not people agree or disagree with something for the most part, and this new feature could become a really important aspect of that as well and it might change the manner in which people end up using Twitter in the first place.
This feature is currently being tested within a select group of global users, and Twitter says the response has been positive so far. It should be noted that according to Twitter these downvotes are not being made public and they will not impact the visibility of comments under a tweet, although that is likely something that is going to change once the feature receives a wider rollout. Twitter will become the second social media platform after Reddit to publicly display downvotes or any kind of negative reaction if this feature actually gets implemented, but we have yet to see a timeline for that so far.
Read next: Twitter Managed to Reduce Negative Interactions By 31 Percent Using Prompts
Reddit managed to take a different approach, and it has stuck with that approach for the most part. On Reddit, you can either upvote something or downvote it, and this will impact how visible it is if you were sorting comments or posts according to that. It turns out that Twitter is also experimenting with a downvote button which is something that a lot of users have been requesting since the only interactions you can make right now allow you to like a tweet or reply to it.
Twitter has been doing a lot to allow statistics to reflect the actual sentiments that people are feeling towards a post or comment. Making quote retweets visible has made it far clearer to understand whether or not people agree or disagree with something for the most part, and this new feature could become a really important aspect of that as well and it might change the manner in which people end up using Twitter in the first place.
This feature is currently being tested within a select group of global users, and Twitter says the response has been positive so far. It should be noted that according to Twitter these downvotes are not being made public and they will not impact the visibility of comments under a tweet, although that is likely something that is going to change once the feature receives a wider rollout. Twitter will become the second social media platform after Reddit to publicly display downvotes or any kind of negative reaction if this feature actually gets implemented, but we have yet to see a timeline for that so far.
Read next: Twitter Managed to Reduce Negative Interactions By 31 Percent Using Prompts