Twitter started testing negative ratings of responses last year, to a select group of web users, and now the company has decided to show it to a global audience of iOS and Android users. Unlike sites like Reddit, the total counts for positive and negative votes are not public , but are used by Twitter to modify the responses it shows to users.
The company stated that the results of the experiment so far have shown that users have marked with a negative vote the answers that they considered offensive or irrelevant , so that they would not have wanted to see.
The conclusion of Twitter is that access to downvoting “ improves the quality of conversations on Twitter “, thus suggesting that the function may eventually become a permanent addition .
The negative ratings and the dislike are an easy way for users to provide feedback on content online, but they can also be problematic. They can be used in targeted harassment campaigns, for example, and if they become part of Twitter's algorithm they could be used to silence dissidents . YouTube and Facebook, for example, have changed their minds several times on ratings and dislike. YouTube found that the “I don't like “were so problematic as to make the count private, while Facebook , meanwhile, experienced negative ratings but never implemented them, initially preferring to give users only the option to” like “to content before expand the range of reactions using emojis .
