September 16, 201511 yr Finally, Facebook is working on a 'dislike' button Facebook (FB) is working on a "dislike" button for its posts. The company's co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg revealed the ongoing tests 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 actually get to say we are working on it, and are very close to shipping a test of it," he said. The CEO said the company has been working on the feature for some time because "we don't want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people's posts." "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," he said, using the lingo of popular online forum Reddit. Instead, Zuckerberg said, the new feature will allow people to "express empathy" with their Facebook friends. I guess it's not really going to be a Dislike after all.
September 16, 201511 yr Author I was just thinking if a Dislike button was on Facebook the way the Like button was there were going to be a lot of hurt feeling, unfriending and blocking going on.
September 16, 201511 yr Facebook has a profit incentive not to employ a "dislike" button. One, like JD said above if people's feelings are getting hurt they might use Facebook less or not at all. Two, lots of advertising on the site is done through posts or promoted pages and seeing the "dislikes" piling up for an advertiser might dissuade them from buying more ad space. My guess is that if they add that feature it will be private or distilled in some manner and Facebook will simply use it for data collection.
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