The talks of adding a ‘dislike’ button on Facebook have been going on from quite a while now. On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a questions and answers session,
People have asked about the ‘dislike’ button for many years, and probably hundreds of people have asked about this, and today is a special day because today is the day that I actually get to say we are working on it, and are very close to shipping a test of it.
The Facebook CEO doesn’t want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people’s posts. Hence, they’re working on the feature that would allow users to express emotions other than just “like”. He said,
That doesn’t seem like the kind of community that we want to create: You don’t want to go through the process of sharing some moment that was important to you in your day and have someone ‘downvote’ it.
I think that it’s a little dangerous to be too negative about the prospect of something long term when all signs point to that over the next 10, 20, 30 years—whatever it is—we’re going to unlock all this value and help people’s lives so much by developing this technology. So I’m an optimist.
Zuckerberg said that the new feature will allow people to “express empathy” with their Facebook friends, explaining what many users of the social media platform already knew:
If you are sharing something that is sad…then it may not feel comfortable to ‘like’ that post.
He also said that the dislike interaction is “surprisingly complicated” to create, but Facebook thinks it will soon begin testing before a wider roll out.
Can you imagine people disliking your Facebook posts in a near future? What do you feel about it? Do let us know in the comments section below!
