We’re not sure if anything has changed from the test earlier this year. Twitter said that the use of the downvote button is to simply let them know what kind of comments or replies you don’t like, which is why you might have downvoted it.
Twitter is working on Downvote button for web after testing it for iOS pic.twitter.com/jd0V8sAsjK
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) October 21, 2021
This is versus other platforms such as Reddit, where posts with a lot of downvotes gets pushed further down the comment list or gets hidden if it has received too many downvotes. According to Twitter’s announcement from earlier this year, they state that downvotes won’t be shown publicly.
This means that it won’t affect the order of the comments and replies, but like we said, we’re not sure if this has changed since the last test. It would be ideal if Twitter could adopt a similar approach to other platforms where heavily downvoted comments get hidden or pushed down the list, but we’ll have to wait and see how this plays out once it becomes publicly available.