For all the negative Facebookers out there—we all know there’s a ton—Mark Zuckerberg has shone a light of rainbows and glitter down on your hate—kind of. During a town hall-style Q&A event on Thursday, Facebook’s creator and CEO told the crowd that no ‘dislike’ button was on the way.
He restated that the idea had been brought up among Facebook decision-makers, as he noted in 2010, but ultimately the company decided it was too negative. He said, “They want to be able to say that a thing isn’t good and that’s not something that we think is good for the world. So we’re not going to build that.”
But, it wasn’t just a cut-and-dry answer. While Zuckerberg says he doesn’t want to just provide a voting mechanism that would say what’s good and what’s bad, which might not be socially valuable, he also recognizes that there should be a way to express an alternate emotion to just those associated with a thumb’s up. For instance, when someone shares that they’ve lost someone, a relationship ended or shares a link that contains upsetting news , Facebook wants to give users the ability to express their range of emotions. He acknowledged that, of course, users can easily express those feelings with a comment, but also states, “I think giving people the power to do that in more ways with more emotions would be powerful.”
This problem may have already been solved by the inclusion of emojis and stickers, which do express a wide range of strange animal-associated emotions and reactions. But if they just created a drop-down with a list of emojis, imagine what our newsfeeds would turn into: “Joe Schmoe just got fired…. ‘10 people :( this, 3 people :| this, 6 people (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ this.’”
His final thoughts: Facebook is currently working on a way to do this so users can make it a force for good and not end up demeaning the content that people are putting out there. We think he’s got his work cut out for him. Give people the option to be a bully or a troll and they will.
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