Despite telling the public for a long time that the social network wasn’t planning to build a “dislike” button, a counter to its iconic “like” button, Facebook has apparently changed its mind. During a Q&A session Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed his company has indeed been working on one.
“I think people have asked about the dislike button for many years. Today is a special day because today is the day I can say we’re working on it and shipping it,” said Mark Zuckerberg.
There aren’t a lot of details beyond that, but Zuckerberg says that Facebook’s goal is to implement the button in a way that makes it a tool to “express empathy” — as in, to Dislike a sad moment that a friend shared — than a way to hurt someone. “We don’t want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people’s posts,” Zuckerberg said. “That doesn’t seem like the kind of community that we want to create: you don’t want to go through the process of sharing some moment that was important to you in your day and have someone downvote it.
Zuckerberg added that the company has held off on a Dislike button to avoid becoming a Reddit-style system that encouraged upvoting and downvoting, according to reports.
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