(Mirror Daily, United States) – Responding to people’s Facebook posts has become a whole lot easier. According to an official announcement, users from Ireland and Spain have already started testing the panel of emoji reactions that allows people to add six emoji instead of just pressing the Like button.
Including reactions such as like, love, yay, wow, haha, sad, and angry, Facebook hopes to expand the emotions that can be used as appropriate responses to a certain post. This “reaction panel” comes roughly a month after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a team was working on developing a “nuanced Dislike button.”
Inside sources added that the new feature won’t be a simple thumbs-down – which would cause a lot of negativity to flood the network – but something that would allow users to show empathy. Oftentimes pressing the Like button on posts of bad would appear as if users endorsed them. But the confusion is gone thanks to the new emoji board.
It’s certainly not the much-awaited Dislike button, but Chris Cox, chief product at Facebook, hopes it addresses the spirit of the most requested feature. The panel is based on a thorough study of what people comment the most across Facebook, and the result is an “elegant and fun experience.”
More than just analyzing the comments, the team also factored in keywords, stickers, and emoji in order to understand which emotions people expressed most. The result was surprising; Mosseri said “hearts were everywhere,” whether it was in the form of heart eyes or simply a heart beating out of a chest.
We can thank Adam Mosseri, the leader of Facebook’s news feed, for the idea of using emoji as means to expand the reaction spectrum. Mosseri’s team consulted with researchers on human emotions and sociologists in order to figure out which emoji were the best fit.
Zuckerberg has always discouraged the idea of a Dislike button, simply because Facebook – and social media in general – already inspire too much negativity among people. Many studies suggest that being involved in social media can lead to depression, unhappiness, and encourage narcissism.
Instead of giving media trolls – users spreading negativity on the Internet – a new channel for their annoying practices, Facebook decided to expand the Like button in a way that makes it less confusing and more appropriate for the variety of posts that exist on the platform.
Image Source: Metro
Ryan Harris
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