Facebook dislike button on the way

Despite telling the public for a long time that the social network wasn’t planning to build a “dislike” button, a counter to its iconic “like” button, Facebook has apparently changed its mind. During a Q&A session Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed his company has indeed been working on one.

“I think people have asked about the dislike button for many years. Today is a special day because today is the day I can say we’re working on it and shipping it,” he said.

Zuckerberg has admitted in the past that the company has considered building a Dislike button, but ultimately decided against it. Presumably, it had to do with the fact that at the time it didn’t want to integrate a way to express negativity toward other users, or create a system of upvoting or downvoting, as online news forum Reddit does.

“That isn’t what we’re here to build in the world,” Zuckerberg said on Tuesday.

However, Facebook does recognize that people sometimes want to express something other than “liking,” but are currently left with no truly good option.

“What they really want is the ability to express empathy. Not every moment is a good moment,” said Zuckerberg.

 

I do understand wanting to express empathy and wanting to at least acknowledge support to a friend's news that may not be good news, so you don't want to like it and sometimes you have no words to offer, but you want to offer an acknowledgement.

I like the idea but I can see how it could also be troublesome...