The Like button on Facebook has evolved to mean a number of things. Agreement, amusement, empathy, enjoyment, sympathy, and so much more can be expressed by simply hitting the Like button. It’s a way to express any kind of positive response to a post without having to take the time to actually type up a comment, but when one Like can mean so many different things, it can be difficult for people to interpret them, even when with context. Fortunately, it looks like Facebook has finally gotten around to working on a solution: emojis.
Facebook is starting to test emojis as reaction icons. No, there's no "dislike" button. http://t.co/dD48lglwAX pic.twitter.com/zk45W8eixs
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 8, 2015
As you can see in the image and tweet above, this solution doesn’t include Dislike button, nor will it ever. Mark Zuckerberg confirmed as much during a Q&A at Facebook’s headquarters last month, where he explained that the company didn’t want to create a Reddit-like system of upvoting and downvoting, or in Facebook’s case, liking and disliking. Instead, it wants to allow users to be more expressive when responding to posts, instead of just using the vague and difficult to interpret Like button.
'Like' this? Facebook hopes users in Spain and Ireland will 'love' their new emotion buttons: http://t.co/dmeWzu18Rd
— The Associated Press (@AP) October 8, 2015
The new reaction emojis will enter testing sometime tomorrow, and from what we can tell, will be six different emojis (Angry, Haha, Love, Sad, Wow, Yay) that will accompany the Like button. Unfortunately, the testing will be exclusive to Facebook users in Ireland and Spain for the time being, and there’s no word on when it’ll expand to other countries. Seeing as how most of us have been waiting years for this kind of thing, however, I’m sure it won’t be that difficult to wait a few more weeks or months.
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