Twitter Inc TWTR is trying out upvote and downvote buttons similar to those on the online discussion forum Reddit as a way to highlight the more relevant replies in long conversation threads.
What Happened: The social media company said the experiment is only for research purposes and is being tried out on Apple Inc’s AAPL iOS platform currently.
The downvote option is not a dislike button and is only visible to the user, Twitter said. The feature will not change the order of replies during the test run.
See Also: Twitter Sinks Fleets, The Ephemeral Tweets Feature
Why It Matters: Cody Elam, staff user researcher at Twitter, said past studies have helped the company understand what type of replies to a post to segregate them as informative, supportive, positive and funny. Though some of those replies wouldn’t surface quickly enough and Twitter aims to fix that.
“This gives people the power to privately voice their opinion on the quality of replies without publicly shaming others while also giving us more nuanced feedback,” Elam wrote in a Twitter post.
“As a researcher, this experiment is a great opportunity to learn about the ways that we can improve conversation ranking on Twitter.”
Twitter and other social media rivals including Facebook Inc FB have been trying out new features to ensure user retention amid rising competition.
Price Action: Twitter shares closed 2.36% higher at $69.54 on Wednesday.
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