Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg answered some questions today in his second public Q&A. Among the questions asked of the all mighty Zuckerberg was the oh so popular “Is Facebook ever going to get a ‘dislike’ button?” query. And really, you can’t fault the millions of Facebook users for being curious about the possibility of having such a button as I’m sure we’ve all encountered posts in our newsfeed worthy of such an honor. (And besides, ‘disliking’ things is a time honored internet tradition!)
Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg had to say in response to the ‘dislike’ button issue, “You know, we’re thinking about it, on the ‘dislike button.’ We’re considering doing one and not the other. The ‘like’ button is valuable because it’s a quick way to share a positive sentiment. Some people have asked for a dislike button so they can say something isn’t good and we’re not going to do that. I don’t think that’s good for the community. The thing I think is really valuable is there are more sentiments than just people liking something. There are things in people’s lives that are sad or tragic, and people don’t want to ‘like’ them. We’ve talked about, for a while, how can people express a wider range of emotions like surprise. There’s something so simple about the ‘like’ button. To comment, like you have to have something witty to say, but the ‘like’ button lets people empathize.”
While I can sympathize with Mark Zuckerberg’s assessment that having a ‘dislike’ button could potentially be toxic to the Facebook community, I would also argue that having such limited options to express your opinions about posts is also rather toxic. Fans of reddit often lament about the lack of a ‘dislike’ button. Why? On reddit, users are able to ‘upvote’ and ‘downvote’ posts in order to (hopefully) screen content and allow highly rated posts greater visibility to users. As many social media users can attest, having unreadable and generally terrible content flood your news feed is the deathknell for social media platforms. (Oh, hello there Myspace.) Hopefully Facebook’s plans will extend beyond allowing nuance in emotional expressions and allow a better way for users to screen the content that they do and, more importantly, do not want to see.