Facebook’s over 1.5bn users will finally have the long sought “dislike” button to show their disapproval on a post. Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the move at a public Q&A session at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Even though Facebook’s main intention at first wasn’t to create a forum where people get to vote up and down on posts — the company’s founder assured the users that they are currently working on a beta which will roll out very soon.
“People have asked about the dislike button for many years,” the 31-year-old billionaire said. “We’ve finally heard you and we’re working on this and we will deliver something that meets the needs of the larger community.
“We’re working on it and are very close to shipping a test of it. We didn’t want to just build a dislike button because we don’t want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people’s posts. That doesn’t seem like the kind of community we want to create.”
“People aren’t looking for the ability to downvote people’s posts, what they really want is to be able to express empathy.
“Not every moment is a good moment and if you’re sharing something sad… then it may not feel comfortable to like that post, but your friends and people want to express that they understand and that they relate to you, so I think it’s important to give people more options than ‘like’ as a quick way to emote and share what they’re feeling on a post.
“We have an idea that we think we’ll be ready to test soon and depending on how that does we’ll be ready to roll it out more broadly.” Zuckerberg said.
Facebook’s “like” button – which enables its 1.49bn monthly active users to approve a post by someone else – has become one of the website’s signature features.
