Facebook’s plan to introduce a ‘dislike’ button is generating a lot of headlines at the moment after CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a Q&A at the company’s headquarters that the button was on its way.
“People have asked about the ‘dislike’ button for many years,” he said, “and today is a special day because today is the day that I actually get to say we are working on it, and are very close to shipping a test of it.”
Zuckerberg attempted to address concerns that the arrival of the button would unleash a deluge of negativity as users rushed to ‘dislike’ or down vote people’s (and company’s) posts, by saying he expected it to be used to express empathy for posts where clicking ‘like’ would appear insensitive or inappropriate. For example, if someone was sharing a post that was sad, a ‘dislike’ button might work better than a ‘like’ one.
According to CNBC, Zuckerberg admitted that creating a dislike button had been “surprisingly complicated”.
And I think I can understand where he’s coming from on that. After all, it’s probably just as easy to misinterpret someone using a ‘dislike’ button for a particular post as it is for a ‘like’ button. Even in the instance that Zuckerberg advanced of someone using it in response to a sad post, would that mean they disliked the situation referred to in the post or the actual post itself?
Anyway, what is more interesting is that Facebook has found it so complicated to introduce a feature that can express someone’s sentiments in response to a post at the click of a button. What it suggests is that people are too complicated and nuanced to have their emotional reactions to posts they’re read or seen reduced to ‘dislike’ or ‘like’.
On the other hand, the demand for the ‘dislike’ button also suggests there are many people out there only too willing to have their emotional responses to posts they’re read or seen expressed by clicking a button marked ‘dislike’ or ‘like’.
But are we really reaching the point where people can’t take the time to write a short sentence expressing empathy or sympathy for another person if he or she posts something sad on Facebook? Or is it perhaps they feel more comfortable pressing a generic button to express a sentiment rather than trying to articulate that sentiment for themselves? If so, what does that say about us?
From a business perspective, it must be questionable whether this reductive approach to users’ responses to posts serves any real purpose. How many likes, for example, translate into queries or sales? On the other side of the equation, how easy will it be to dislike a business post and flippantly inflict harm on a company’s reputation, product or service without having any engagement with it at all? How would companies ‘like’ that?
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