There is no doubt that Elon Musk came to Twitter to give it a 180º turn. Not only did he change its name, perhaps the mildest of the changes, he also made it an unpleasant space for his employees and an icon of conflict. With this in mind, it is not strange that he has now decided to return with one of his Old projects: the dislike button… among others.
If X or LRACCT (the network formerly known as Twitter) had recently decided to hide Likes and comments from our feed, now it “copies” YouTube’s strategy, which allows us to signal when we don’t like a video. Only in this case, the heart that signals liking a post remains and, instead of choosing a thumbs down like YouTube or a broken heart, the choice goes through a down arrow.
That’s what X Daily News’ social media points out, stating that Although this is speculation, some users may already have this option.
SPECULATION: X might be bringing back the downvote button https://t.co/GnApHOQ1Mhpic.twitter.com/rIbzry6WBC
— X Daily News (@xDaily) July 2, 2024
The idea is not new, Twitter had already tested negative votes in 2021. But this time it could be Definite considering Musk rarely backs down. in their bets, no matter what the cost is.
One of the first to point out This new option has been Jay Baxterformer leader of the applied machine learning research team at Twitter and currently one of the people responsible for Community Notes (formerly known as Birdwatch), a feature in which users can add context (for example fact-checking) to a post.
Community Notes wouldn’t work well without negative rating signal.
But you have to be smart about how you use them. If you naively add them all up, you’ll get a hivemind like Reddit.
One way: only downrank if you see negative ratings from people who typically disagree https://t.co/YfX7Fpm8ka
— Jay Baxter (@_jaybaxter_) July 2, 2024
“Community Notes” would not work well without a negative rating signal“a,” Baxter says in his post. “But you have to be smart about how you use them. If you add them all up naively, you get a hive mind like Reddit. One way to do this is to lower the rank of posts that are disliked by people who generally use it a lot.”
While this does not indicate that the option is final, it is a key that from within X they are already explaining their possible options and criteria