Re:Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons
by lifthrasiir on Thursday July 22, 2021 @05:56AM
(#27917134)
I too think negative signaling is valuable, but I doubt Twitter will ever correctly implement that. This is evident from the state of "report tweet" menu. Reporting can be thought as a strong negative signal that happens to be also ToS violation, but its implementation is far from working; not just political figures, but I've seen even direct death threats against minorities with numerous reports ignored multiple times. Twitter seems to have no incentive to fix reporting and I don't think downvotes will be different.
Re:Twitter tests Reddit-style upvote and downvote buttons
by pjc50 on Thursday July 22, 2021 @05:19AM
(#27916943)
This is far from guaranteed: "The company also said it’s not currently using this vote information to rank the replies at this time"
Currently every way to interact with a tweet drives its engagement score: likes, retweets and replies all result in more visibility for a tweet. So if you think a tweet is unproductive or wrong, you can express that in a reply, but even that is resulting in more visibility for the original tweet. This incentivizes bad behavior, because even if someone does is get a lot of people upset or outraged, this is going to result in more attention and prominence on the platform.
But if you have a button which is essentially saying: "twitter, please de-rank this", it allows a way to respond to comments which are not worthy of engaging with but you don't want them to stand uncontested.
Also with up/down votes, it's much healthier if the numbers are hidden. Otherwise the incentive becomes to win the game rather than to have a discussion.