Tiktok Adds A Dislike Button For Comments
Users of the app TikTok can now give comments a bad rating. But the so-called “downvotes” shouldn’t be shown to the public. TikTok’s main goal with the function is to get feedback on content that isn’t appropriate. But it’s not clear if this is how the users will also use the button.
TikTok has been working for a while on a “dislike” button. In April 2022, the company said that the first test phase would start soon.
Even back then, the video platform said that the main point of the function was to get feedback on comments that were not appropriate. Now, the Bytedance subsidiary tweeted that the feature is now available to everyone.
Tiktok: Use The “Dislike” Button To Report Inappropriate Content
TikTok hopes that the most important thing this feature will do is “better identify irrelevant or inappropriate comments.” In turn, that would help “encourage a comments section where real people can talk to each other.”
Along with the option to report a comment for not following the community rules, there will be a “dislike” button. The company said that the dislike button is not a way to report comments and that users should instead use the normal way to report comments that are harassing.
To do this, people should downvote comments that are spam or just don’t belong. TikTok says that this would make it easier for the platform to find content that is relevant.
Negative Reviews Are Not Visible
TikTok says that the dislikes can’t be seen by the public so that the feature doesn’t get abused. Nobody, including the person who made the comment or other users, could see the bad ratings. This, in turn, should help “give the community a better experience.”
But it doesn’t seem likely that people on the platform actually use downvotes in this way. Instead, many people may just click the “Dislike” button to show that they don’t like a comment.
Twitter Also Uses A Dislike Button
The idea of a dislike button is also used by other social networks. For example, YouTube users have been able to both like and dislike videos for a long time. But the company got rid of the dislike feature in November 2021.
First, you can only use the “Dislike” button on replies to tweets, not on the original tweets themselves. And the person who wrote the tweet won’t see the option to dislike it, but everyone else will. Twitter is using this feature right now to find out how users feel about it and how it might be used.
After a test period, Twitter also added more ways to downvote. There, too, users can give bad ratings to content. Like TikTok, the main goal of Twitter is to get feedback without showing the dislikes. On the other hand, the social news site Reddit tells its users how many negative votes a comment has gotten.
