Twitter has always been a platform for lively discussions, with people more often than not getting too engaged in such kinds of discussions, for better or for worse. To date, however, there has been only one option, at least in recent times to show how you feel about the particular reply or tweet, which was the like button. This can show the user’s feelings towards another user’s tweet, if they like it they can press the like button, if not they can opt not to like and rather provide their thoughts via a reply.
Twitter Is Testing Down-Voting of Tweets
During the wee hours of Thursday, Twitter announced that it will be testing a way to up-vote and down-vote replies, in a bid to understand what remarks a user might find relevant in their context, and, what they might feel is non-contextual. This announcement was made via a tweet by Twitter Support, mentioning that some iPhone users could see this option. Downvotes would not be public as of now, but the upvotes will appear as likes on a particular mention or tweet. Cody Elam, a User Researcher at Twitter in a thread of tweets explained that this option would give the people the power to privately voice their opinion on the quality of replies without having to publicly shame others and providing more nuanced feedback. Twitter users who have spotted the new icons were quick to tweet out the images of the new tool, which looks like a thumbs-up and thumbs-down button. The company failed to mention the number of people involved, but a spokeswoman, reaching out to CNET said that it was part of a small research experiment. The spokeswoman also added that a reply would not be impacted depending on the ranking of the replies, but mentioned that Twitter was looking at how the upvote and downvote matches in contrast to what the company seems to think are the most relevant replies under a certain discussion or tweet. Recently, Twitter made some changes to TweetDeck as well, which is a social media dashboard offered by Twitter that not a lot of users know about and what could become a subscription-based service in the near future. The new features for TweetDeck include new column types, a new method of grouping columns into clean workspaces, advanced search abilities and full Tweet composers, as per Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour.
