Taking a page from the book written by Reddit (or even YouTube, if you’d rather), Twitter has revealed that it is testing a new “upvote-downvote” feature as a tool on its iOS app, for a select few users. The new was announced through a quick succession of tweets, and had managed to pique the interest of quite a few people.
Likes But No Dislikes
The upvote and downvote buttons might be familiar to anyone who uses Reddit, where their function is to order a subreddit’s favourite replies, posts, and even responses. However, Twitter insists on being different and has said that on its platform, the buttons will have no bearing whatsoever on the ranking of replies to a tweet.
Neither is this a new way to get someone’s post ratioed (getting ratioed means having more replies to a post than likes or retweets, showing that people are expressing their own opinion on something someone said).
Instead, their purpose seems to be limited only to research (for now, anyway), as the team holds that this new feature will allow users to more easily “voice their opinions” about the relative usefulness of the replies to a tweet, without making their opinion known to other users.
To this effect, the downvote button is apparently not similar to a dislike button (or so the company claims), and will not be made public. The same cannot be said for the upvote button, however, as it will be visible to other users, and should you upvote any post, it will be displayed to the world as likes.
Future Tool? Or Just A Test?
The fact that Twitter is testing the new upvote-downvote feature does not provide any information on whether or not users should expect an Android version of the tool. We don’t even know if the upvote-downvote buttons will make the cut towards becoming an official feature on the platform, or will remain limited to testing. Moreover, there is no heads-up on whether the buttons will bring about any changes that are reflected on one’s Feed.
While the sunset of the public taking part in the tests is similar in being iOS users, there can exist subtle differences in the style that these buttons take up, when it comes to individual users. The firm has said that to some, the upvote-downvote feature might come across as up and down arrows like the ones on Reddit, or even Quora, while to others, a YouTube-like thumbs up and thumbs down might be made available. Another option could be a mix of the heart icon from Instagram (for the upvote) and the down arrow from Reddit (for the downvote).
This is yet another revelation that Twitter has made about its plans for its new platform, barely a day after announcing a major revamp to TweetDeck.
Meanwhile, Reddit, too, replied to Twitter’s tweet, clearly enjoying the news.
