Do you ever have one of those days where you’re just scrolling down your news feed on Facebook and you see one of those posts that slightly break your heart because a friend might be having a particularly rough day? Ever wish that instead of liking things, you could just dislike the status?
Well, you might have to wait a little bit longer for that coveted dislike button but Facebook has released new buttons to help expression your emotions even further.
These buttons are being called reactions, so that a person might be able to express their joy, anger, surprise, sadness, etc. on various posts they might see on their news feed.
“This is just the beginning,” Facebook director Tom Alison said. “The team is still going to be looking at how people are using this. We’re going to be learning a lot.”
Even just from initial testing, not all buttons made it to the global release of the new feature. The official new buttons consist of: “love” “haha” “yay” “wow” “sad” and “angry.” The “yay” and “confused” reactions unfortunately did not make the final cut and were removed before the reactions went global.
According to Alison, these reaction will count just like a regular like on a post, but it could change over time. Currently, these reactions are not intended as another marketing tactic to find out how people react to posts. So people currently don’t have to worry about what they react to unleashing a whole new wave of different ads because they loved a certain post a few days ago.
During the testing, users seemed more inclined to use the “love” reaction. Alison noted that this might change with whatever may be happening in current events, such as a disaster or tragedy, might result in an influx of “sad” or “anger.” “You’re going to see it change dynamically in response to things that are going on,” Alison said.
Personally, I would have loved a confused reaction button because that’s how I feel during the election year with half the nonsense I see on my news feed.
Someday, maybe, we will get the dislike button we all deserve. What reaction buttons do you see yourself using often? Which buttons do you want to see in the future?
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