X, formerly known as Twitter, may be bringing back the downvote feature for posts — something it previously tested in 2021, before Elon Musk acquired the social network. At the time of the original experiment, Twitter had tested upvote and downvote buttons, similar to the way users can vote on the social forum site Reddit. But now, Code references found Some changes to the X iOS app suggest that the company may be considering adding downvotes to just replies to improve its ranking.
The code was first discovered by reverse engineer Aaron Peiris, @aaronp613 on X, Which regularly reveals new features for the app ahead of launch; the code references were discovered in an iOS app update on Tuesday, Peris told TechCrunch.
Finding a reference in the app code to a new feature or functionality doesn’t necessarily mean that the company is planning to release the feature to the public. Companies, especially social media apps, test new features internally all the time before deciding whether to expand or cancel the project.
However, in this case, at least one X engineer, as well as X owner Elon Musk, has commented on the potential addition.
according to Jay Baxter For a senior machine learning engineer at X who works on Community Notes, the idea of leveraging negative signaling could be useful, as it’s something that works with X’s crowdsourced fact-checking feature as well.
He explains that if you aggregate all the negative signals, you might get a “hive mentality like Reddit.” But one way to improve this system is to downrank posts that have received negative ratings from people who don’t normally agree, He said on X.
This is similar to the system X uses with community feedback, a feature that requires consensus among people who don’t normally agree before its fact checks can be published.
While Baxter didn’t specifically confirm that downvotes were in development, he said Community Notes relied on private ratings to avoid “group brainwashing,” and that private rating data was released anonymously after 48 hours to make ratings public without “poisoning the rating process” itself.
Musk too Share this topic With a one-word comment: “True.”
Using a consensus-building algorithm to rank posts could help X highlight the best responses in long-form threads, and could inspire other companies to use similar tools on their platforms. Already, X’s Community Notes feature has inspired YouTube to test its own version, simply called Notes. In an era when people don’t always agree on the truth, it’s a way to centralize what “most people” agree is the accepted truth, while still citing sources. But it’s run by the social network’s users, not a central authority.
But other social media startups are exploring different ways to manage their communities. Blue Sky, for example, is experimenting with authorable content management, where users can sign up with their own content management providers to customize the app to their liking—even layering one service on top of another.
Downvotes may not be the only change coming to X. Another post from Perris is now floating around X It shows a user interface that hides sharing buttons, such as the “Like” and “Repost” buttons, by default in favor of a new gesture-based menu to access these and other actions.