After testing them out in the live environment for over six months, TikTok is finally announcing the rollout of its comment downvotes for all users, as a means to flag inappropriate responses to video clips. TikTok’s ‘Thumbs Down’ comment downvote option will be displayed at the far right of each comment, providing a quick and easy way for users to tag such, helping TikTok identify negative behaviors in the app.
Push It Down
This is likely the key focus – rather than being another response element for the audience, like how downvotes pretty much function on Reddit, TikTok’s approach is to use these indicators as a means to weed out negative behaviors.
As per TikTok back in April:
“We’ve started testing a way to let individuals identify comments they believe to be irrelevant or inappropriate. This community feedback will add to the range of factors we already use to help keep the comment section consistently relevant and a place for genuine engagement. To avoid creating ill-feeling between community members or demoralize creators, only the person who registered a dislike on a comment will be able to see that they have done so.”
Again, unlike Reddit, it seems that dislike counts won’t be public, with the purpose being to help TikTok’s moderation team get on top of negative trends, as flagged by its users. How it’ll likely work in this respect is that downvoted comments will be displayed to TikTok moderators in ascending order, based on total downvote activity across the app, enabling them to wade through a list of rising negative trends, serving as another way to address such.
This is also expected to help limit the use of the feature for ‘brigading’ or as a means to launch target attacks on people or opinions. It’s not too hard to imagine how people might try using this feature as a means to downvote conflicting views and opinions right down the gutter, which is why TikTok’s somewhat comfortable pushing ahead with a full launch – it may be a good way to keep things more civil and positive.
TikTok first began its comment downvoting experiment back in 2020. Both Facebook and Twitter have also been experimenting with comment downvotes for a similar purpose, helping identify negative behaviors based on what users think is ‘bad’. This could be the better use of the option overall, though it is worth noting that Reddit’s public downvote system does help it highlight more relevant conversations and topics, based on actual human response, as opposed to algorithmically defined trends.
The Wrap
The issue with algorithmic trends is that divisive and negative content is amplified via this process because sparking emotional response drives more people to engage. It does seem that a human-moderated process, via public downvotes, could improve the flow of information in this respect, but the impacts on engagement could also be significant. In any case, TikTok’s comment downvotes are not designed to help guide the conversation but are instead valuable supplementary measures that detect rising negative trends.
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