X Likely to Add Another Evaluation Feature to Discussions

Social network X is testing a downvote option for post replies, allowing users to provide feedback on comments. This feature was discovered in the app’s back-end code by Aaron Perris and later confirmed by X company engineer Jay Baxter.

The downvoting system is more complex than it appears at first glance. According to Baxter, downvotes will be weighted based on users’ political views. This means that downvotes will only have a significant impact on a comment if they come from users who typically disagree with the comment’s viewpoint. The goal is to prevent users with specific ideologies from unfairly downrating comments they simply disagree with, and to ensure that spam and misleading comments are downrated instead.

“Community Notes wouldn’t work well without a negative rating signal. But you have to use them wisely. If you naively sum them all up, you get groupthink like on Reddit. Solution: only downrank if you see downvotes from people who usually disagree,” Baxter stated in his post.

The aim is to create a system without political bias. It should ensure that irrelevant and false comments are more likely to be pushed to the end of the list, rather than silencing differing opinions.

Although this experiment is in its early stages and hasn’t been confirmed for live testing yet, it represents an interesting approach to improving app engagement and content relevance. Social network managers should be on alert, as future discussions could be significantly influenced by managing user interactions and rating comments.