Facebook Launches 5 New Reactions Emoticons
Rolled out today in the UK, and elsewhere, Facebook has now extended the ‘Like’ button to five further emojis or emoticon responses. It was previously thought the extended responses might just be the addition of a thumbs down ‘Dislike‘ button. Instead, the social media behemoth has embraced shades of feeling and fuzzy logic rather than a binary either/or, like/dislike. One button, however, the “Yay” emoji didn’t make the final cut.
The buttons were trialed last year in pilot projects in Ireland, Japan, and Spain. You can now choose between ‘Like‘, ‘Love‘, ‘Haha‘ (rather than the informal JaJa the Spanish version has gone for ‘Me divierte‘), ‘Wow‘, ‘Sad‘, and ‘Angry‘. Perhaps the Irish version should have had ‘Drink’, ‘Feck’, ‘Girls’ and the Spanish: ‘Sun’, ‘Sea’, ‘Sand’, ‘Sangria’! They missed a chance not including ‘Sucks‘ in the British and US versions. Perhaps a future rollout could offer expansion packs like a Bill and Ted version including “Dude”, “Totally”…
Facebook’s Julie Zhuo, product design director, says we’re being given “greater control over [our] expressivity”. It is taking a big risk stepping away from the simple ‘Like’ button. Normally, one doesn’t mess with success, or fix what isn’t broken.
All engagements will be treated by its advertising and feed algorithms to show us more of what we seemingly like and love, make us laugh or amaze us – although many people are astonished by the algorithm fails when we are served totally inappropriate ads or Britain First posts. Perhaps the angry stuff will diminish, who knows, but for now even they will bump up in our feeds. In addition, the responses, are being rolled out to company pages, brands and products, and owners will not be able to block the negative responses. Perhaps we still need an “I don’t want to see stuff like this” emoji – perhaps a hand covering the eyes?
At the end of the day, Facebook, already the most successful social media corporation on the planet, needs and wants more engagement, and it believes this may encourage it ,although their stock market value was down 1% today. Youtube, owned by Google, has, like many other platforms, a simple thumbs up or thumbs down like/dislike switch, but it is difficult to read into the latter the range of emotions and reasons why we might ‘dislike’ something, and equally, it seems incongruous to ‘like’ someone’s negative health status or loss, but sometimes we want to show empathy and that we’ve seen a post without having the words to express something – or simply don’t want the barrage of notifications updates should we engage via a comment. Personally, I’d love a sympathy ‘Hugs’ emoticon to save me typing {hugs} so frequently.