Twitter announced that it has started testing a new feature to let users dislike tweets with a new voting system. The company claims that the new system will appear in a few different styles and that “dislikes” or “negative ratings” will not be shown publicly and that the original tweeter will not receive any notification, but will still be able to see them.
The “positive votes”, on the other hand, will be treated as the classic “likes”, which means that you will receive notifications as usual. Twitter also clarifies that the negative vote button is not a “Dislike” button and that it is strictly for research purposes.
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
In this research experiment , the thumb down icon is a negative vote letting us know that you think the answer is not relevant to the conversation.
That said, it appears that negative votes are limited to replies to tweets, not to the original tweet itself. Furthermore, the votes will not alter the order of the answers, as it does on platforms like Reddit, with a similar voting structure. Unfortunately, the test is only available to some iOS users, but it's also coming to Android.
