Twitter Testing 'Dislike' Button. Thanks, We Hate It.

Twitter Testing ‘Dislike’ Button. Thanks, We Hate It.

After failing to copy Instagram Stories for their Fleets feature, Twitter is cloning Reddit’s upvote and downvote feature.

For clarification, Reddit wasn’t the first site to have this feature – services like Hacker News, Digg, forums, Slashdot already had it, but Reddit definitely popularised it.

HOLY SH—-

Twitter has added a dislike button!!!@ThisIsNoahEvans @wongmjane @9to5mac pic.twitter.com/1Zm7TDlF2u
— Silver Eagle (@LightRod97) July 21, 2021

Twitter is doing this research with various methods in the replies – up and down arrows, heart icon and a down arrow and a thumbs up and thumbs down icon. This limited test is only available for iOS users.

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
— Support (@Support) July 21, 2021

Twitter even clarified that the downvotes are not public. The company adds that they are not using this upvote/downvote feature to rank replies. Prolific reverse-engineer Jane Manchung also confirmed this.

At this prototype stage, downvoting on replies doesn’t actually send the signal of “[user] downvoted [this reply]” to their server

It means downvoting doesn’t actually affect the replies ranking for now https://t.co/JkKrpjPlf6
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) July 21, 2021

Twitter said that this test is going to help them figure out what sort of replies users on its platform find most relevant during their conversations.

Also, this test confirms what Twitter’s product lead, Kayvon had shared on Twitter late last year.

#1, 2 and 4 are literally our top priority (making the public conversation on Twitter) and has been for years. We’ve made a lot of progress but still lots to do. We do feel it’s important to solve other problems too! As for #3, this is something we’re exploring.
— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) November 17, 2020

This revelation received mixed reactions on Twitter.

Twitter weakened the ratio with the ability to disable replies even after a tweet is posted but then strengthened it with this https://t.co/zZjk7nhUxD
— Aseemru (@Aseemru) July 21, 2021

I swear to god no one who works at Twitter has ever used Twitter. https://t.co/Jej3ya4mzX
— Shayne Mathis (@MetalShayne2000) July 21, 2021

https://twitter.com/iamsamgould/status/1418146420788445185

How is @twitter so absolutely awful at designing their own product so frequently https://t.co/W2b2KxEaEv
— Rami Ismail / رامي (@tha_rami) July 22, 2021

given how reddit operates i think this presents a larger problem of people once again using automated processes to adversely affect reach for marginalised people but go off https://t.co/twRWE91XZF
— adrie rose 🇯🇲 (@adrierising) July 21, 2021

it sounds like twitter is less interested in using this as a reddit upvote/downvote feature and more like they're going to use the dislike buttons to model more AI?

but either way it's definitely gonna be used by bigots lmao https://t.co/a65rwOjLkf
— johannes (yo-han-ehz) / semi-professional cuntboy (@JohannesTEvans) July 21, 2021