Twitter is testing out emoji reactions… just like Facebook

While it may have been a bit slow on the uptake, it appears that even Twitter is realising that reacting with a little heart to every tweet, be it contextually good or bad information, may send the wrong message. The popular social media platform is reportedly looking at ways to help users better express their feelings towards a tweet. Over the course of the last month, Twitter has been surveying it’s many, many users regarding what kind of responses they’d like to see implemented in the app. Each of these responses would have an associated emoji, akin to how Facebook manages the process. Emojis have historically done well on Twitter, so the update would make sense.

The survey asked participants to select five out of seven reactions they wanted to most see in the app. Some of the consistent reactions included “awesome”, “interesting”, “sad”, “funny” and “like”. These sentiments were then visually represented with an emoji with participants being asked how applicable they thought the emoji was. How one expresses “like” is a strange idea but a thumbs up would probably get the job done.

Twitter reacts to: Emojis

That’s not all the survey prodded people about. The final two suggestions, which were randomly swapped out between different sample groups, included the responses of “support” and “angry” which were sometimes swapped out for “agree” and “disagree”.

Perhaps more controversially, Twitter also surveyed users on whether or not they want a “dislike” button included on the app which, while not a great idea at first thought, is still a very common means of judging content on the internet. Massive sites like Reddit and YouTube incorporate the “downvote” button but given how much more personal Twitter is for some folks, this could be seen as a contentious point.

Whether or not these changes actually take effect remains unknown. This is just a survey, so it might amount to nothing. Yet it’s still interesting to note that Twitter is clearly trying rework how people engage with the platform.

Source: TechCrunch