Latest Twitter tweak to test what happens when users downvote replies – Ars Technica

Twitter, long known for its slow and careful evolution of its core product, the tweet, is rolling out a worldwide test that would allow users to downvote replies, a feature that could significantly change how the service works. 

The concept of downvoting posts and comments has been a staple of the Internet for decades, appearing on sites such as Slashdot, Reddit, and Ars Technica. The concept is simple—users who find issue with a post can vote it down.

“We learned a lot about the types of replies you don’t find relevant and we’re expanding this test—more of you on web and soon iOS and Android will have the option to use reply downvoting,” Twitter said in a tweet.

Downvotes are a double-edged sword. They can be useful for flagging comments that don’t contribute to the conversation or are abusive or otherwise harmful. But they can also be used to harass and stifle conversations.

In Twitter’s current test, a selection of users will be offered the option to upvote and downvote replies to a tweet. Only Twitter itself and the user who cast the vote can see the downvote—neither the user who posted the reply nor the one who posted the parent tweet can view them. Upvotes are translated into likes and displayed to everyone.

Twitter said that it’s using the test to gather feedback on what users find useful—in other words, data collected during the test is probably being used as training data for its ranking algorithm.

The company offered other details in a reply tweet:

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 may say that downvotes are “not a dislike button,” but it’s all but certain that some users will interpret it that way.)

Competitor Facebook tested the idea a few years ago but ended up killing the feature before it could be rolled out widely. YouTube, which long showed both like and dislike counts below videos, hid dislike counts in November after an experiment showed that the practice made users “less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike attacking behavior,” the company said. People who upload videos, though, can still see dislike counts in their account’s analytics.

While Twitter’s dislike button could improve the quality of conversation on the platform—letting some users vent by downvoting rather than leaving a nasty comment—it could also have a negative effect. “It has the potential to increase negativity and abuse because through this downvote function we could see these anonymous networked campaigns to thwart marginalized voices,” Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communications at Cornell University, told NBC News in response to Twitter’s more limited trial.

Whether downvotes end up helping or hurting the quality of conversation on Twitter will depend largely on how the company implements the feature. Facebook, for example, added emoji reactions instead of downvotes, giving them up to five times the weight of a regular “like” in the ranking algorithm. As a result, engagement rose, but Facebook’s own research showed that angry reactions more frequently appeared on toxic content. Eventually, the company cut the reaction’s weight to zero.