If downvoting is done reddit style where it buries posts I suppose that would be good but also open the door for great abuse.

If it’s done YouTube style (thumbs down button) it just counts as engagement and promotes the post but without any visibility as to why.

How would you prevent abuse of the downvoting button? Any serious feature proposal should explain how it’s useful but also how its abuse would have limited effects.

> More visibility to smaller tweeters. My feed is full of boring/dumb comments from "big tweeters" that get thousands of likes because of their large number of followers. Smart tweets from upstarts often get little to no viewings.

Switch to the "regular" feed that shows only content from people you follow. That won’t help you discover small accounts but at least you won’t get the boring accounts.

> How would you prevent abuse of the downvoting button?

I wouldn't have downvotes on tweets, only on comments. Yes, people would sometimes downvote things they just disagree with, but I'd rather have more containerization than endless flame wars.

If you want quality debate, find a tweeter whose followers want the same thing. Or have you debate off Twitter.

> Switch to the "regular" feed that shows only content from people you follow.

My main gripe is that I want more people to discover _me_ :-D But in general platforms like Tiktok make it much more inviting for new people to contribute. Being a low-follower-count tweeter is not fun.

1) Twitter already has a downvote button, though it's still in testing so it's not available all the time.

2) I think this one is just a reflection of how you use Twitter. Besides people in my niche community, most of my timeline is random viral tweets from accounts with <100k followers.

I'm not talking about how I use Twitter. I'm talking about how most Twitter users don't tweet [1], mainly because it's super hard work to get any reactions at all if you don't already have a following. Modern social networks like Tiktok are much better at this which results in higher levels of participation.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90697826/the-top-25-most-active-...