One possibility is that X, which was previously known as Twitter, will reintroduce a downvote tool for postings. This is something that the company had previously experimented with in 2021, before Elon Musk’s takeover of the social network. Twitter tried both upvoting and downvoting buttons during the first trial. These buttons are similar to the voting system that users have on the social forum website Reddit. Now, however, code references discovered in the X iOS app suggest that the firm could be contemplating the addition of downvotes for responses only for the purpose of enhancing the ranking of such answers.
Aaron Perris, a reverse engineer who goes by the handle @aaronp613 on X, is the one who discovered the code for the first time. He is known for discovering new app features in advance of their introduction. Perris reported finding the code references in the Tuesday-released iOS app version.
If you find a reference in an application’s code that describes a new feature or capability, this does not necessarily mean that the corporation intends to make the feature available to the general public. It is common practice for businesses, and social media applications in particular, to conduct internal testing of new features before determining whether or not to extend a project or abandon it.
On the other hand, in this particular instance, at least one X engineer and Elon Musk, the owner of X, have stated their opinions about the potential addition.
According to Jay Baxter, a senior staff machine learning engineer at X who works on Community Notes, the concept of using a negative signal might be beneficial. This is because it is also applicable to the crowdsourced fact-checking service that X offers
If you added up all the negative signals, you’d get a “hivemind with the same characteristics as Reddit.” According to what he mentioned on X, however, one approach to making this technique more effective would be to just de-rank the postings that received negative ratings from those who normally disagree with the content.
This method is similar to X’s use of Community Notes, a feature that necessitates the consensus of individuals who typically disagree before making the fact-checks public. 
Baxter stated that Community Notes relies on private ratings to avoid a “hivemind,” despite his inability to explicitly confirm the development of downvotes. Furthermore, he explained that they anonymously shared the private rating data after 48 hours to make the ratings public without compromising the rating process itself.
Musk also contributed to the discussion by leaving a single-word remark that read, “True.”
Making use of a consensus-building algorithm to rate postings might be helpful to X in highlighting the best responses within lengthy threads, and it could also motivate other businesses to implement comparable capabilities on their platforms. Already, X’s Community Notes function has inspired YouTube to develop its own version, known as Notes. It is a method that allows one to concentrate on what “most people” agree on as the accepted reality while still identifying sources in this day and age, when people do not always agree on the truth. Nevertheless, the users of the social network, not a centralized authority, govern it.
On the other hand, some other social entrepreneurs are investigating different approaches to community moderation. Bluesky, for example, is researching and developing composable moderation, which allows users to subscribe to their own moderation service providers in order to personalize the application to their preferences. This allows users to even stack one service on top of another.
It’s possible that downvotes won’t be the only thing that changes to X. Another post from Perris, which is now making its way around X, demonstrates a user interface that, by default, conceals engagement buttons like the “Like” and “Repost” buttons in favor of a new gesture-based menu that allows users to access these and other activities.
