FB dislike

Facebook is working on a “dislike” button for its posts. This was revealved by the company’s co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg, during a question and answer session on Tuesday.

“People have asked about the ‘dislike’ button for many years, and probably hundreds of people have asked about this, and today is a special day because today is the day that I really get to say we’re working on it, and are very close to shipping a test of it,” he stated.

The “dislike” button has been a subject of much discussion through the years.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed the plans for such a button during a Q&A session on the company’s headquarters Tuesday. The thought for such a brand new feature, which the social network plans to start testing soon, has been shot down by Zuckerberg and different Facebook executives before. However moving beyond “Like” is key to growing Facebook’s ability to surface a greater variety of content folks really care about.

The centerpiece of the Facebook experience is the News Feed, the individualized stream of stories, articles, cat photos and old style status updates you see whenever you go to the social network’s web site or app. Facebook uses an algorithm to curate the News Feed, because there’s simply too much content material to show all of it in chronological order as it once did. Each time you go to the News Feed, Facebook’s algorithm kicks into gear, sorting all of the available posts from your pals, pages you’ve liked and advertisers into order based on what it thinks you’ll find most interesting.

Facebook can’t read minds (yet), so the firm can only guess as to which posts every consumer will care the most about. The News Feed algorithm takes under consideration hundreds of factors to determine its ranking, ranging from how much you tend to watch video posts to how often a person has clicked the poster’s profile photos. Plenty of it amounts to painstaking guesswork.

However clicking Like is totally different. It’s binary and unequivocal. You either Like something or you don’t. Due to this fact, it’s one of the biggest elements in News Feed’s secret sauce. Posts that get plenty of Likes from some users are positioned higher up in other users’ feeds because it’s assumed they’ll appeal to even more engagement and Likes.

That works to some extent, however it doesn’t necessarily assist Facebook meet its stated goal of “connecting the world.” After all, the 1.5 billion humans (and some dogs, cats and robots etc) using Facebook experience a variety of feelings in addition to “Like.” As the social network increasingly positions itself as a destination for news and thought-provoking conversations, “Like” grows ever more restrictive. Customers don’t want to “Like” an article about the struggles of Syrian refugees or give a thumbs up when a buddy shares that a loved one has died. Thus, Facebook’s algorithm might bury this kind of essential content material under traditional Internet catnip.
Dislike much?
It will NOT be called the ‘dislike’ button

So “Dislike,” or whatever it winds up being known as, might provide a counterbalance to that phenomenon, making it simpler for customers to signal interest in a post or story that would be awkward to “Like.” Though Zuckerberg didn’t explain precisely how a dislike button would work, it certainly won’t be framed as a way to hate on your cousin’s cat photos. Facebook already has tools that allow individuals to hide posts, people and ads that they don’t care about. “Dislike,” then, is about opening up an avenue for users to interact with interesting content that would be awkward to do anything with inside Facebook’s present framework.

“If you’re expressing something sad . . . it may not feel comfortable to ‘like’ that post, but your pals and other people need to have the ability to express that they understand,” Zuckerberg stated on Tuesday.

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