Twitter, which has now been rebranded to X, has been in the news for a while now. More for the drastic changes Elon Musk has been doing to the platform ever since he took over. He has introduced several new features and plans, some of which were also pretty controversial. Now, reports suggest that he is working on another new feature, which can be possibly known as “downvoting”.
Liking posts is all that we know on social media. But sometimes, after seeing certain things, a lot of netizens wish for a dislike button to exist. Seems like X took it too seriously. The company seems to be developing a downvoting feature. This is being done to enhance the ranking of replies.
We are yet to officially hear from X in this regard but reports suggest that it will be a proper “dislike” button and might not be like a traditional Reddit-style icon. A code reference spotted on the X iOS revealed a button that resembled a broken heart icon next to the traditional heart-shaped “like” button. This was discovered by reverse engineer Aaron Perris (@aaronp613 on X). In addition to this, there were direct mentions of the dislike button too.
Well, this dislike button is not just limited to Musk. Twitter (now X) was testing this feature back in 2021 as well. When the trials first happened, both upvoting and downvoting buttons were tested across all posts. But right now, reports suggest that X is focusing on downvotes only for replies.
How will this help? With this, X aims to show better replies at the top of long threads while pushing the less-liked ones further down. This will prevent people from posting unnecessary things on the platform.
The feature might roll out soon but I am not really sure about it. In today’s day and age, where trolling gets so brutal on the internet, how will this help? What do you think about it?
