Last summer, Twitter was inspired by the system in place on Reddit by testing the possibility of voting on the relevance of responses published under tweets. The social network has just announced via a message published on its official support account the deployment of this new feature to all of its users.
We’ve been testing how we can surface the most relevant replies within Tweets with the use of downvoting on replies. As we’re expanding the experiment to a global audience, we want to share a little about what we have learned thus far!
? https://t.co/wM0CpwRgo6— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) February 3, 2022
After these seven months of testing, Twitter explained following its initial tweet, what it was able to learn from this experience. The platform thus explained that “most users indicated that the reason they clicked the down arrow (we will speak here of “downvote”, editor’s note) because the answer was offensive, because it was irrelevant, or both..
With this experiment, Twitter also highlighted the fact that this function was mainly used by tweeters to report content that they no longer wanted to appear on their feed. The conclusion of this test, which took place over several months, seems to be rather positive, “people who have tested the function agree that it has allowed them to improve the quality of conversations on Twitter”, said the social network in a last message.
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Downvotes by users are not displayed publicly, but are meant to help Twitter, or rather its algorithm, to select better “content that people want to see”. The function, currently being deployed on the web version of Twitter, should arrive very soon on Android and iOS mobile applications.