Facebook CEO today confirmed that the ‘Dislike’ button is on its way to the social network. Several users have been demanding the same for quite some time now, but apparently Facebook hasn’t been very certain about including it so far.
“the company realized people want to express emotions other than positivity and the dislike button will serve the purpose in such situations,” stated the 31 year old in a Q&A session.
The upcoming ‘Dislike’ button will empower users to expressing empathy, and might not be implemented in the conventional manner. After all, Facebook wouldn’t want copious ‘Dislike’ counts on sponsored posts.
“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,” Said Zuckerberg
You must be thinking, how hard can it actually be to add an Dislike button? Why would Facebook need to ship a test for something as simple? Well, Mark explains that Facebook doesn’t want to be a community where people go and down vote a post, as in Reddit.
There are several questions left unanswered for now. Will a simple Dislike button suffice to express dissent? Since Dislike button sounds as equally inapt to express empathy as the Like button for a post titled “My dog just died”, there are good chances that it will be called something else.
We are not very sure what exactly Facebook is cooking, but some users should get to test this new feature soon enough. Roll out for a larger audience shall proceed later.
