Facebook Might Finally Make Dislike Button a Reality
Exciting news straight from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook is working on a dislike button! Considering that we’ve been asking for a dislike button for a long, long time now, I just have to say that this is great news. Great news… unless there is a catch, of course.
Here’s the catch! Zuckerberg says that using the dislike button to dislike posts just won’t do. So even if Facebook implements a dislike button, you won’t be able to use it to let your friends know that their cat pics suck or that they’re supporting the wrong US presidential candidate.
On Tuesday, September 15, Mark Zuckerberg hosted a townhall Q&A session at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
Lots of questions were thrown Zuckerberg’s way, including one that focused on the introduction of a dislike button. Someone from Cairo pointed out that liking posts is not enough and we should have more options. Facebook users should be able to say things like “I’m sorry” or “interesting” and even “dislike”.
Zuckerberg’s response was that today is a special day, the day when he gets to announce that Facebook is indeed working on a dislike button and it’s close to rolling out a test version.
That’s the yay part. Here comes the what you talking about part.
Implementing a like and a dislike button is akin to giving people the chance to vote; they can vote up posts they like and they can vote down posts they don't like. Ah but you see, posting something that’s important to you and having people vote it down is a negative experience – and Facebook does not want that sort of negativity for its users.
As Zuckerberg put it, people don’t want a dislike button to downvote posts. “What they really want is the ability to express empathy,” said the 31-year-old CEO whose estimated worth is over $38 billion.
Say Bob from accounting posts something serious or sad on Facebook. If he had posted something funny, you would have liked Bob’s post. But since the post is about something serious, you don’t feel comfortable clicking the like button. This is where the dislike button comes in. It allows you to show empathy, it allows you to show Bob that you can relate to whatever he posted.
“I do think that it is important to give people more options than just like as a quick way to emote and share what they’re feeling on a post. So, we’ve been working on this for a while, actually its surprisingly complicated to make an interaction that you want to be that simple, but we have an idea that we think we’re going to be ready to test soon,” said Zuckerberg.
Click the image below to access Facebook’s Newsroom where you can see a video of the whole Q&A session as well as a video about introducing a dislike button.
Here’s the catch! Zuckerberg says that using the dislike button to dislike posts just won’t do. So even if Facebook implements a dislike button, you won’t be able to use it to let your friends know that their cat pics suck or that they’re supporting the wrong US presidential candidate.
On Tuesday, September 15, Mark Zuckerberg hosted a townhall Q&A session at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
Lots of questions were thrown Zuckerberg’s way, including one that focused on the introduction of a dislike button. Someone from Cairo pointed out that liking posts is not enough and we should have more options. Facebook users should be able to say things like “I’m sorry” or “interesting” and even “dislike”.
Zuckerberg’s response was that today is a special day, the day when he gets to announce that Facebook is indeed working on a dislike button and it’s close to rolling out a test version.
That’s the yay part. Here comes the what you talking about part.
Implementing a like and a dislike button is akin to giving people the chance to vote; they can vote up posts they like and they can vote down posts they don't like. Ah but you see, posting something that’s important to you and having people vote it down is a negative experience – and Facebook does not want that sort of negativity for its users.
As Zuckerberg put it, people don’t want a dislike button to downvote posts. “What they really want is the ability to express empathy,” said the 31-year-old CEO whose estimated worth is over $38 billion.
Say Bob from accounting posts something serious or sad on Facebook. If he had posted something funny, you would have liked Bob’s post. But since the post is about something serious, you don’t feel comfortable clicking the like button. This is where the dislike button comes in. It allows you to show empathy, it allows you to show Bob that you can relate to whatever he posted.
“I do think that it is important to give people more options than just like as a quick way to emote and share what they’re feeling on a post. So, we’ve been working on this for a while, actually its surprisingly complicated to make an interaction that you want to be that simple, but we have an idea that we think we’re going to be ready to test soon,” said Zuckerberg.
Click the image below to access Facebook’s Newsroom where you can see a video of the whole Q&A session as well as a video about introducing a dislike button.
