Twitter had introduced a downvote reply feature in 2021 to limited audiences, and the micro-blogging website is now going global with the rollout of this feature, which is still under testing.

Soon, users around the world will be able to use this feature, which is currently limited to Twitter web. Android and iOS users will have access to it as well, the micro-blogging platform has promised.

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The social media giant noted that most users made use of the downvote feature to flag posts that they found offensive, irrelevant, or both.

However, downvotes have not always worked for social media companies in the past. YouTube, for instance, found downvotes so demotivating for its users that it decided to hide the vote-counter altogether by making it not visible to the public. YouTube now only shows the number of likes on a video.

Facebook, too, has played around the with the idea of implementing a dislike feature, but has never implemented it on its platform.

Given the history of implementing a downvote or dislike feature on social media, Twitter has said that downvotes on its platform will not be visible publicly. Instead, the micro-blogging platform will use insights from people’s downvoting behaviour to better understand the kind of content that they want.

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The micro-blogging platform has said that its conclusion, as of now, is that downvoting “improves the quality of conversations on Twitter.”

In addition to the global rollout of the downvote feature, Twitter is reportedly also working on another new feature called Articles. This feature, if introduced, will allow users to write lengthier posts as they will no longer be limited by the 280 character limit applicable to tweets.