Twitter had introduced its downvote reply feature last year to a limited number of its users. Now, the company has started rolling out the feature globally. As of now, the feature is limited to web users, whereas, the company has announced that iOS and Android app users will get the feature at a later date.
Apart from globally rolling out the feature, the company has also announced that it will continue to keep the downvotes on replies hidden. These will just help the platform recognise more relevant comments and make them more visible. Upvotes on replies will continue to be publically visible in the terms of likes.
We learned a lot about the types of replies you don't find relevant and we're expanding this test –– more of you on web and soon iOS and Android will have the option to use reply downvoting.
Downvotes aren’t public, but they'll help inform us of the content people want to see. https://t.co/g8LcTpQqDv pic.twitter.com/wm5MmdR4Xh
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) February 3, 2022
The micro-blogging platform has stated that during the feature's testing, it has realised that the majority of users clicked the down arrow because the reply was either offensive, irrelevant or both. They also found that "downvoting is the most frequently used way for people to flag content they don’t want to see."
In other news, Twitter is reportedly working on a new feature called Articles. The new Articles feature will allow users to write longer posts, with no character count limit, that is imposed on tweets. The current character count limit imposed by Twitter is 280 characters in a single tweet.
To write longer posts, users earlier had to write tweet threads, which spanned over multiple tweets. With the help of the new Articles feature, it will become more convenient for users who want to post something longer, thus eliminating the requirement of chaining multiple tweets into a thread.
