Twitter is testing a Reddit-like downvote button on comments

You know which features are the best features? The ones no one asks for and become widely used. We reckon this will be one of those: Twitter is testing a ‘downvote’ button on tweet comments which will allow users to downvote comments they dislike. 

The feature will work in a similar manner to Reddit’s downvote mechanism, which helps show users the best content first, pushing bad content down into the depths of ‘I didn’t scroll that far’. According to some users, the downvote button started showing up in the iOS Twitter app. 

Twitter is kinda Reddit backwards

It’s part of a new experimental feature that’ll try to show users more relevant information in the replies of a long thread, for example. Twitter reckons this will help them develop an algorithm that’ll help bring more relevant responses to the top of the thread.  “In long threads, for instance, the best replies don’t always show up immediately and might be buried underneath tons of other people’s tweets,” Engadget details an example. 

Because this is just a test, not every user on iOS will see the downvote button. Even more, it’ll probably work slightly different for a few people in the test group — this just shows that Twitter’s testing a few different methods to see what works best. 

The nice thing about having millions of users, is that you can easily test a new feature on a small group without affecting the larger userbase. This way Twitter can firstly see if the feature works at all, which methods work best and how much users actually use it. The social platform’s been on a roll with its features lately, releasing closed captions for voice tweets, trashing fleets and even giving away NFTs on the side.