Social giant Facebook recently started giving some users the option to upvote and downvote posts a la Reddit, and it seems that feature is now starting to roll out to a wider subset of users, though the company has yet to confirm that. As such, there is obviously no news on who’s going to have the new feature rolled out next, when the rollout will expand again, or when the feature will reach all users, provided it has even been greenlit. The latest rollout seems to be centered on Australia and New Zealand.
The new Facebook feature that’s being referred to comes in the form of upvote and downvote buttons on public posts and comments. They manifest almost identically to how they’re seen on Reddit, but rather than supplanting the like and reaction system, they act as a sort of community vetting mechanism. The buttons are not for liking and disliking posts as seen on Reddit, but instead for revealing posts and comments that are authoritative and insightful, versus posts and comments that may be spammy, non-sequitur, or otherwise irrelevant or worthy of being ignored. For the time being, there seems to be no real direct consequence for having a post or comment upvoted or downvoted, aside from the fact that users may pay greater or lesser heed to a piece of content depending on how other users have upvoted or downvoted it. The feature is rolling out in an all-in-one form, so if you are not able to participate in upvoting and downvoting content, you will not be able to see other people’s upvotes and downvotes either.
Facebook has had tons of issues in the past with content that’s abusive, deceitful, outright illegal, or otherwise troublesome. While the social platform has been working on ways to eliminate such content, the service is populated by over a billion actual human users, to say nothing of the numerous bots and mule accounts, which makes it extremely hard to keep tabs on everything that’s going on. This system may help put users in charge when it comes to vetting the value of content on Facebook, making the jobs of Facebook’s AI and human moderators that much easier.