FacebookFacebook finally rolled out the new reaction buttons, which is its way of giving users other options besides just liking a status. Now if you want to show support for your friend who lost her job, got a flat tire, punched a Subway employee and stubbed her toe all in the same hour, you won't look like a d--k for digitally saying "I like that all this terrible stuff happened to you!" You can just choose one of the new animated emojis and display actual human empathy. Or, as much human empathy you can show on a social media site.
So now users can choose between five reactions: Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad or Angry. And that seems like a big gift, considering all we had to work with before was a thumbs up icon. But unfortunately, people are asking—nay, yelling at, Facebook about one giant feature that's still missing.
"WHERE IS THE DISLIKE BUTTON?!" screams the masses. Facebook users have been begging for an actual thumbs down icon, and instead we got giant, moving faces. The Twitter-sphere is not pleased.
Sorry, guys. In the words of the great poet Taylor Swift: We are never, ever, ever...getting a Facebook dislike button.
Why?
Two reasons: Facebook didn't want to limit a user's reaction to just a simple "dislike." Instead they can tell someone they don't like a post with either "sad" "angry," or even a sarcastic "wow." But can one pull of a sarcastic emoji? Like Facebook says in its blog post announcing the rollout, users have a wide arrange of reactions to different topics, so giving them a dislike button was in their eyes, restrictive.
"This might seem like a pretty straightforward task: Just slap a thumbs down next to the Like button and ship it. It's not nearly that simple though," Geoff Teehan, Facebook's director of product design, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. "People need a much higher degree of sophistication and richness in what choices we provide for their communications. Binary ‘like' and ‘dislike' doesn't properly reflect how we react to the vast array of things we encounter in our real lives."
The other reason we will never get a dislike button is because it's just too harsh of a reaction. According to Bloomberg, Facebook execs shot down the idea of a thumbs down button straight away because it was seen as too negative.
So put away those dreams of that glorious thumbs down icon; it's not happening. But at least we have a better way of letting our mom know that no, we are not okay with her setting us up with Bill, the "funny guy that works in payroll. " That post will get an "angry" emoji, for sure.