Science & Tech

Reactions To Facebook’s New Like Buttons—The Internet Goes Wild

Published on: February 26, 2016 at 12:39 PM
By Basanta Lamichhane

Browsing through news feed and liking the posts you love is a common Facebook activity. Liking Facebook updates is often was of expressing social niceties. There were times you hated a video on Facebook, but you could do nothing about it and the best you could do was ignore it, but, much to your irritation, it just kept reappearing on your news feed and you always felt like maybe Facebook was too nice, maybe it is good for people to receive negative criticisms too. Your wish may have been fulfilled as Facebook now has added wide range of emoji’s for like button, Facebook still keeps is trademark euphemisms intact.

After finally acknowledging “like” is not the right sentiment for any occasions, Facebook is now offering 5 new emojis which are labelled as “reactions.”

The internet has gone wild after the hugely anticipated move by Facebook. Many people are showing their appreciation to the move and the internet trolls have found a new bunny.

Twitter user bassfloyd poked fun at sympathy Facebook like bait pictures.

https://twitter.com/bassfloyd/status/703269659483758592

User Kendra Alvey thought the number of choices were still not enough

https://twitter.com/Kendragarden/status/702539511985602561

User Ramsey Mohsen wen to the depths of brains

The Best Song tweeted about the excitement of people following the launch.

If this tweet by adweek is to be believed, the buttons have already made their way into advertisements.

Felicity Morse, Social Media editor is scared by the idea of letting her emotions be known to her well-wishers

TechnicallyRon had his share of fun explaining the emojis

USA Today reported that, with the click of the buttons, users now have a choice of new emotions when commenting on a status update. Hold the “like” button on mobile or hover over the like button on desktop and five animated emojis pop up. Click on love, haha, wow, sad, or angry to express your reaction. Contrary to the previous feeds which only displayed the numbers of likes and comments, the new feed will so a tally of total reactions with comments.

In reference with the newly launched emojis, Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook.

“Sometimes you want to share something sad or frustrating. Our community has been asking for a dislike button for years, but not because people want to tell friends they don’t like their posts. People want to express empathy and make it comfortable to share a wider range of emotions.”

Facebook claims that a lot of research was done for more than a year tapping focus groups and surveys and poring over short one- to three-word comments, These emojis help people to express their emotions electronically.

The five emojis were selected after detailed research, they are translated into numerous languages. The emoji “yay” was discarded because the company thought it was not universal enough.

“We have been very intentional about really understanding what people are trying to communicate on Facebook right now and how can we make that easier,” said Tom Alison, engineering director of News Feed.

Research analyst Brian Biau says the demand of dislike button suggested people were getting frustrated with the lack of choices in response to the post.

“What these emoji do is give greater granularity in expressing what you are thinking and feeling about something that was posted on Facebook,” Blau said.

Facebook has made it clear that there is still no room for grumpy people to express their emotions. Even with the introduction of new range of emotions, there are still usual euphemisms. Why not directly introduce much asked ‘dislike’ button rather than using a minimal version in the “angry” emoji?

With the introduction of these buttons Facebook has increased the emotional bandwidth but if it’ll live to the expectations of users is yet to be known.

[Photo by: Rainier Ehrhardt /Getty Images]

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