Facebook Is Finally Giving You A 'Dislike' Button. Only It's Not Actually A 'Dislike Button' At All

"My cat Chester passed away last night..."

'Like'

"Chris and Helen have ended their relationship"

'Like'

"I can't believe what's happening in Syria right now"

'Like'

The 'Like' button is limited. You know this, Facebook knows this, and it's finally doing something about it.

Speaking at public Q&A, the social network's CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered a question relating to Facebook's lack of 'interaction' buttons, revealing that they're about to launch an "empathy" option.

"I think people have asked about the dislike button for many years. Probably hundreds of people have asked about this," said Zuckerberg. "Today is a special today because today is the day where I actually get to say we are working on it and are very close to shipping a test of it."

But you're not about to get a "Dislike" button - an option to vent your disapproval of a friend's banal status update or picture.

"...we didn’t want to just build a Dislike button 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 we want to create," he said. So if it's not a Dislike button, what is it?

"Not every moment is a good moment and if you are sharing something that is sad, like the refugee crisis that touches you, or a family member passed away, it may not feel comfortable to like that post," Zuckerberg explained. "But your friends and people want to be able to express that they understand and that they relate to you. So I do think it’s important to give people more options than just like as a quick way to emote and share what they are feeling on a post.

"We have been working on this for a while. It’s surprisingly complicated to make an interaction that you want to be that simple. We have an idea that we think we’re going to be ready to test soon. And depending on how it does, we’ll roll it out more broadly."

Here's the reveal in full.

Will a "Sorry/Empathy" button improve Facebook? Will it result in a showering of attention-seeking posts, reducing emotional responses to the touch of a button? Let us know.

[Via: Techcrunch]