Facebook getting the ‘Dislike Button’, Zuckerberg confirms!

Yes! It’s true. At last! After years and years of rumours, hearsay and hoaxes, Facebook have finally confirmed that Facebook is getting a dislike button!

Well, sort of.

(Yes plenty of scams out there exploiting this news. See our article on them here.)

It could be argued that it has been on the cards for a long time, and is certainly a feature that thousands of Facebook users have requested, even implored, for.

And throughout the years there have been plenty of hoaxes that have spread across the number one social network falsely asserting that the Dislike button is nigh.

Well now it’s real. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg confirmed in a Q+A that Facebook are in the process of testing and delivering a system that will allow users to do some equivalent of “disliking” a post.

Zuckerberg was responding to a question about the potential implementation of a “Dislike” button during a September 15th Q+A, and stated that he didn’t want Facebook to be turned into a voting system where people can either like or dislike a Facebook post, much like it works on Reddit.

However he did acknowledge that pressing the like button isn’t always an appropriate response for certain types of posts, especially for posts about sensitive, upsetting or delicate subjects. Most of us have at one point hesitated over the like option when wanting to acknowledge a sad post but ‘like’ just seems a little too insensitive.

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Like many of Facebook’s users, Zuckerberg wants people to be able to express empathy that isn’t always obvious when you hit the “like” option. He also stated that Facebook are currently testing a potential solution that, if it goes down well, will be rolled out to the rest of us.

Details are sketchy. In fact we don’t even know if it will be called “Dislike”, or if it will be available for every post on Facebook. Further questions like how this could potentially affect the reach of a post or its Edgerank (the algorithm that controls a posts popularity) value are also unknown, but it seems that we will all be finding out really soon!

Watch Mark’s full response to the question on the Facebook newsroom here.

How do you think the Dislike option will be implemented? Let us know, and keep tuned for further updates!