If you’re used to Facebook reactions, then you might have wished for a similar thing to happen on Twitter. Or you might be one of those that got angry when Twitter tried to replace the heart (like) with stars. Either way you could make the social media giant know how you feel about having possible emoji reactions on the platform. Well, if you’re one of the chosen respondents to an ongoing survey about them “exploring additional ways for people to express themselves in conversations happening”.
Tech Crunch shared some details about the survey where Twitter seems to be proposing two different sets of emoji reactions. Both sets include heart (like), laughing while crying (funny), thinking face (interesting), and crying face (sad). The variations between the two sets include shocked face or fire emoji (awesome) or hug emoji or raised hands (support). These are pretty similar to the emoji reactions that Twitter gave us for Direct Messages.
But what may become a bit more contentious is that Twitter may also be proposing a way to upvote or downvote a tweet as part of the reactions. The options they’re asking are either a thumbs up or thumbs down, a “100” in green or red, or a green up arrow icon or red down arrow icon. The survey also asks if respondents will ask whether they would use reactions instead of replying to a tweet or if they will consider downvoting irrelevant or offensive tweets or would they take a downvote as “constructive feedback” on their own content.
Other social media platforms like Reddit and YouTube have been using upvote and downvote as a way for their users to engage with content. And expanded emoji reactions have of course been made popular by Facebook since they introduced it in 2015 and later on adapted by other platforms like LinkedIn. There have been mixed reactions with both kinds of reactions but people eventually got used to it.
Twitter said reactions are still in the exploratory stage and so the survey is checking out how people would react to such a change. Let’s see how user feedback would affect their decision whether or not to pursue this.
