The company’s founder Mark Zuckerberg said at a live-streamed Q&A Tuesday from the company’s headquarters at Menlo Park, California that users “have asked about the “dislike” button for many years….”
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Social networking site Facebook, which generates most of its traffic from unemployed people all over the world, recently announced that it was going to add a “dislike” button.
Facebook’s CEO is aware of the potential negativity the Dislike button could possibly bring, but also wants to introduce a new option to enable users to express a wider range of emotions. For example, it feels weird to “like” someone’s post about being severely ill. Users have already begun offering suggestions for forms of the button that they think will minimize misuse and harassment, like adding a sympathy button or enabling users to opt out of having the dislike button displayed on their posts.
Another website I frequent, Reddit, has long had “upvotes” and “downvotes”.
Users however, should not be anxious about the issues caused by introduction of thumbs down feature as Facebook won’t explicitly put it next to “Like” button like on YouTube where it is working casually.
Both BJP and AAP supporters welcomed the launch of new button and were excited to use it against each other. Giving it the means to turn negative or aggressive would be a mistake. This gives us a better idea about what Facebook plans to do to offer users a way to express dislike, or other possible emotions, for a post without writing a comment.
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If you don’t quite know what to expect from Facebook in the near future, think of a new button that functions very similar to the functionality in Slack. I can just hit “dislike” on a post and have my name appear on the list of people who dislike this post. Whenever someone sees a post, picture, quote, book or anything else, they can choose to like that specific topic or not. Anonymity is often viewed as one of the problems of the Internet, but I view it as something that can be really nice to have on a forum as public and open as Facebook.
