As of lately, Twitter has not been afraid to experiment with new features on its otherwise straightforward social media platform. Some of those experiments like Spaces never end up taking off, but it’s important for the company to try new features so users stay engaged in the platform. Today, Twitter is trialing a new feature that — if adopted — will undoubtedly be controversial. Some beta testers of the iOS app will start to see a different design for liking a tweet alongside an entirely new button to “downvote” a tweet.
If you were thinking that this sounds similar to a certain rival social media platform launched in 2005, you’re absolutely right. Reddit has used upvotes and downvotes to rank content since the platform first launched 16 years ago, and it remains a core part of the website to this day. Posts with more net upvotes are considered more relevant by the Reddit algorithm and thus rank higher in subreddits and on user feeds and private home pages. On Twitter, though, upvotes and downvotes will work slightly differently, and they’ll only show up in replies instead of on all tweets. Upvotes are basically just rebranded likes, while downvotes won’t show up publicly and currently aren’t used to sort replies.
Some of you on iOS may see different options to up or down vote on replies. We’re testing this to understand the types of replies you find relevant in a convo, so we can work on ways to show more of them.
Your downvotes aren’t public, while your upvotes will be shown as likes. pic.twitter.com/hrBfrKQdcY
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 21, 2021
Twitter is also testing a couple of different designs for the upvote and downvote buttons. One of the designs uses up and down arrows, while another design consists of a thumbs up and a thumbs down. They have identical functionality, and it looks like Twitter is merely researching how these buttons are used by users to see if it’s worth adopting them.
Some key notes about this experiment:
1. This is just a test for research right now.
2. This is not a dislike button.
3. Your downvotes are visible to you only.
4. Votes won’t change the order of replies.— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 21, 2021
If you want to try it out by yourself, you can download the Twitter iOS beta on TestFlight. However, it seems to be rolling out to users as part of an A/B test, so there’s no guarantee you’ll see the new buttons if you sign up for the beta.
The post Twitter is testing a downvote button for tweet replies on iOS appeared first on xda-developers.
source https://www.xda-developers.com/twitter-testing-downvote-button/