Ladies and gentlemen, our voices have finally been heard. Facebook announced Wednesday that after a plethora of requests from the public, a dislike button will soon appear on the social media site.
Facebook CEO and Jesse Eisenberg look-alike Mark Zuckerberg announced the change during a Q-and-A session at the company’s headquarters, during which he said users would be able to try out the button themselves soon.
“Probably hundreds of people have asked about this, 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 said.
I don’t know about y’all, but this is an exciting moment in the history of social media. Not just because this is a Facebook feature that actually sounds useful, but because of all of the different ways it changes the way we interact with our “friends” and family.
Have you ever seen a post that pops up on your wall that’s extremely sad, yet has a bunch of likes? Like when a family member dies or someone flunks their math test? To me, it always seemed weird to “like” those kinds of statuses because it seemed insensitive, even if the “like” is out of sympathy.
In fact, Zuckerberg’s reasoning for toying with the idea of the dislike button is mainly for that purpose: to avoid seeming ingenuine on Facebook. Then again, genuineness is something that’s rare to see these days within any social medium, but that’s a topic for someone else to write a term paper on.
The thing about the dislike button that seems the most intriguing and potentially incendiary is the freedom that users now have to express negative emotions with the click of a button. If you truly disagree with a post, or flat-out just don’t like the individual who posted it, you now have the ability to make them aware of that.
For example, what if a distant cousin posts what’s possibly the millionth photo of their baby gawking at the camera? Click! Dislike. Or say someone writes a status update in some gobbledy-gook cluster of misspelled run-on sentences that they call “English?” Dislike. Or how about when your crush posts their Man Crush Monday/Woman Crush Wednesday post and it’s not you? Dislike.
I’m not saying these are ways that everyone will undoubtedly use and abuse the dislike button but the point is, the possibility to do so will soon exist. Currently, there’s no timetable for when the button will make its debut, but until then, one can only wonder what other user requests Facebook may consider embracing.
Personally, I think it would be cool if they put an end to the whole “harvesting our personal information for the sake of advertisements” aspect of the site, but I’d also be okay if we didn’t have to download the Messenger app to chat anymore. At this point, only time will tell.
