Is the dislike button on replies returning to social media Elon Musk X? It seems, according to a post from X product head Nikita Bier.
Last night on X, Bier revealed that the dislike button in replies may be returning and shared a screen recording of the feature on the platform. The feature can inform the platform’s algorithm what kind of content a user doesn’t want to see in their feed.
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“they should have a dislike button on twitter too” wrote one X user on Tuesday.
“Give me 60 seconds,” Bier said answered.
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A few hours later, Bier posted about spam problems at X, an issue Musk had originally promised to fix when he acquired the company in October 2022.
“The financial incentive to spam X is going to drop dramatically over the next 30 days and soon become negative,” Bier said.
Like clockwork, the spammer sent a seemingly AI-generated reply to Bier’s post. Bier answered with a screen recording showing how the dislike button will work on mobile.
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The dislike button on Bier’s video appears as a down icon. The icon appears in the reply between the “like” and bookmark buttons. When pressing the dislike button, a “Reply to feedback” prompt appears asking the user for more information.
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“Tell us what’s wrong with this answer,” the report said. “Your answer is confidential.”
The user is then given five options to choose from: Not interested in this post, inaccurate or misleading, AI generated, spam, or report post.
The X dislike button does not have a public dislike counter. The purpose of the button appears to be strictly to notify the forum of the type of content you would prefer not to see.
“Are you really posting the dislike button it looks good,” one user responded in a screenshot.
“I’m afraid it’s the only way forward,” answered Bier.
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The dislike button on X isn’t available yet, but it might seem familiar. Similar to Social Notes and X Premium, Musk’s social media platform takes ownership of another feature that was built by the old Twitter before Musk acquired the company.
In 2017, it’s Twitter released a program that allows users to tell the platform if they don’t like a tweet. Then in 2020, Twitter started to test implementation of a proper dislike or downvote system on the platform.
A version of the dislike button was previously released as global survey feature in February 2022. Instead of a down button, however, this test version used a downvote arrow similar to the one from Reddit. However, testing for the feature was eventually abandoned, and the feature disappeared.
July 2024, application researcher found code in the X app for iOS that points to a possible update to the downvoting system.
It seems like X is flirting with the idea again. Unlike last time, the company’s head of product is talking about it publicly, so it seems that another version of the dislike button will come out eventually.
