Facebook looks like they’re taking a page from Buzzfeed with the new ‘like’ button.
If you hover your mouse over the ‘like’ button on someone’s post, six different options appear with accompanying emojis: “Like,” “Love,” “Haha,” “Wow,” “Sad” and “Angry.”
Instead of showing you simply how many ‘likes’ a picture or a status update has at the bottom, Facebook Reactions shows the three most popular emoji reactions along with a number of how many total reactions there were.
In an interview with WIRED, Facebook’s product design director Julie Zhuo said, “Mark gathered a bunch of people in a room and was like, ‘Hey we’ve been hearing this feedback from people for a really, really long time.’”
She’s right—Wonder if Facebook kept a running tab of all the comments saying, “OMG I wish there was a love button!!”
On one hand, the new feature can seem a bit clunky, and takes some time to adjust to. On the other hand, now you can avoid the intense mental conflict of trying to figure out whether you should ‘like’ someone’s post about their cat dying (like, do they know I’m just trying to be sympathetic? Or will they think I’m happy that their cat died?!). You can also quit worrying people will think you actually support Donald Trump when you ‘like’ an article about the latest inflammatory thing he said.
Just choose the appropriate reaction and you are good to go, girl! Gone is the ambiguity of a single button to acknowledge that you read or appreciated something, or felt literally anything about it.
The one reaction that seems missing is the one people seem to have been asking for the most—a dislike button. “Angry” and “Sad” can probably articulate that well enough, though.
What do you think of the update?