Remember the upvote and downvote buttons on Reddit, or even the Like and Dislike buttons on YouTube? It seems like Twitter is picking up a thing or two from these tactics, while still maintaining its own twist, as the social media giant has announced that it is currently testing its own set of upvote and downvote buttons on its platform.
The company revealed the news through a tweet on July 21st, saying, “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.” This was followed up by another tweet that upvoting or downvoting any tweet will have no effect on the order of replies.
As such, it looks like this is where Twitter branches away from Reddit, where the feature has a bearing on the ordering of favourite replies, posts, and responses, for individual subreddits. However, the Jack Dorsey-led platform has clearly stated that as far as the test is concerned, the downvotes should not be considered to be a dislike button, and hence, won’t be made public. On the other hand, upvotes are a different story, and upvoting any post will be made public, and will come across as likes to other users.
The tool is currently under testing on a small subset of iOS users, with no heads up on whether or not there will be an Android version. Moreover, the style or display of the new buttons might be different for different users. While some may see up and down arrows akin to those on Reddit, other might see a heart icon (like the one on Instagram) against a down arrow. Another type of icons could be the thumbs up up thumbs down, which one encounters on YouTube.
This new feature comes shortly (or rather, just a day) after the firm announced that TweetDeck will be getting a major overhaul, complete with new columns (that many users have called out for being “too wide”). However, there is no clarification on whether this new tool is on its way to becoming an official and permanent feature, nor on how using the feature affect one’s Feed). Last year, product lead Kayvon Beykpour had said that Twitter Inc. had been toying with the idea of bringing out dislike buttons.
