Facebook announced last week plans for the “dislike” button during a Q&A session at the company headquarters.
While some people would certainly use the new feature to simply “downvote” a post, the major utilization of the “dislike” button would be to curtly express emotions like sympathy on a post where “liking” it doesn’t really feel emotionally appropriate.
After years of constant nagging, Facebook has finally caved into user demands and is seriously working on a variant of the Dislike Button. Giving it the means to turn negative or aggressive would be a mistake. However, this didn’t stop people from showing concern about how the addition of a “Dislike” button will only make the social media a less friendlier place than it already is and how it will give bullies another tool to harass their victims. For example, a girl could post a selfie and get multiple “dislikes” from her peers and classmates. Further he mentioned that it won’t be called as “Dislike” button which turns Facebook into a forum where people vote up and down to the posts, it is not the community that Facebook wants to create.
Will we see frustrated people disliking photos of food? Bravo all around! Mr. Zuckerberg has chose to step up and give you your “dislike” button.
Yeung also notes that in 2012, a Facebook engineer answered a question on Quora about why the social network hadn’t yet added a dislike button, which many users have considered a logical counterpoint to the like button.
Though users have been asking for a dislike button, Zuckerberg stated that it might not actually be called the dislike button or be represented with a thumbs down icon. I don’t enjoy the fact that you are sick and weren’t able to go to work today, I just want to show that I acknowledge your struggle without having to commit to a whole comment! You can’t whip up an insincere, “I’m sorry?” The documents filed to the US Patent and Trademark Office explains how emoji reactions can be used as a separate new button for users to interact with content on the social network.