Elon Musk’s social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), is reportedly working on a new “Dislike” button that will allow users to downvote a post or comment and improve the ranking of replies, according to a new report by TechCrunch.
According to the code references discovered in the beta version of X’s iOS app, the new “Dislike” button resembles a heartbroken emoji-style icon positioned next to the platform’s heart-shaped “Like” button on X. There are also direct references to a ‘downvote’ feature.
Apparently, the dislike button was tested in 2021 on iOS as Twitter, much before Musk took over the company. At the time of the “small research experiment,” both “like” and “dislike” options were tested across all posts but they were later put on hold.
“The latest tests indicate that X is only considering allowing downvotes on replies, to help showcase the better replies at the top of a long thread while moving less-liked replies further down the thread. That could prevent users from posting content designed specifically to anger people and trying to generate dislikes as a form of engagement,” the TechCrunch report stated.
Earlier this month, reverse engineer Aaron Perris (@aaronp613 on X) also reported about the downvote feature. In his recent findings, he has found additional image files in the X iOS app that show the ‘dislike’ button as a broken heart, along with more direct references to the feature itself.
The ability to dislike posts are coming to the X for iOS app as well pic.twitter.com/rWk5mkRcip
— Aaron (@aaronp613) July 11, 2024
Perris also shared screenshots on X showcasing strings of text in the app’s code that prompt users to confirm their downvotes, with phrases like “Do you want to downvote this post?” and “Downvote this post.” However, considering that the code only mentions “posts” instead of “replies,” it remains unclear whether X plans to apply the downvote feature to all posts and replies or just posts on the platform.
Notably, another user, @P4mui, posted a video clip of the dislike button in action on X. However, the clip suggests that the button is currently only available for replies and not for posts on the microblogging platform.
Le nouveau bouton dislike en action (appelé downvote en interne), pour le moment c’est uniquement prévu pour les réponses
X 10.49@xDaily pic.twitter.com/ZVgk8izTt1
— P4mui (@P4mui) July 11, 2024
While X hasn’t officially confirmed the dislike button, it seems that the company will likely conduct more public tests of the feature before rolling it out to all users. Besides the ‘Dislike’ feature, Musk last month confirmed the rollout of a new feature that would hide ‘likes’ from the platform by default for X users.
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