Last summer, Twitter began testing the upvote and downvote options on a tweet reply. Now, a few months later, the downvote button is on a global scale – while the upvote button is not visible. Twitter said this was still a test – or more precisely “experimental” global – but the company has also shared what was learned about the use of downvote keys in the months already in limited testing among certain groups.
The first thing first: Even though the downvote button continues globally, there is not much about the way it changes. The amount of downvote will not be published, so no one really knows how much particular Twitter post has been downvoted. Twitter security says that the “majority” users say the reason they are downvoted a specific reply is because the answer is considered offensive, it is not relevant to the topic faced, or both.
Twitter said that the experiment “also revealed that downvoting is the most frequently used way for people to mark content that they don’t want to see.” In addition, the same testing group seems to agree that downvotes improve the quality of Twitter conversations, which is why we see Twitter forward with global tests.
On the one hand, it makes sense because the way Twitter has implemented a sort of downvotes to give us the best of both worlds. Downvotes can help sink replies that are not helpful or offensive, but without public reading from the comment scores (as we see in reddit), there is less than the chance of people dogpiling replies only because they have seen that it is very helpful for downvoted. For now, there is no word when Twitter plans to move this feature from the experimental phase, but regardless, more users on the web, iOS and Android must immediately comment.
In other Twitter news, the company also announced today that it is developing new features that will automatically detect when a Twitter post contains harmful language and asks the user to reconsider their comments before publishing it. In testing, Twitter said that 30% of users who saw this prompt good “change or deleted those replies in response, which is a fairly large number. Twitter even publishes research on this feature through Cornell University, in a paper called “Considering Tweet: Intervention during Tweet creates a decrease in content that is offensive.”
So, we have several Twitter features in works that must make conversations more productive and less vitriolic – or at least that’s the hope. We will notify you when Twitter shares more news about these features in the future, but for now, look for downvote buttons to air throughout the web, iOS, and implements of Android Twitter immediately.
