
Inside Facebook’s Decision to Blow Up the Like Button - edtrudeau
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-facebook-reactions-chris-cox/
======
abluecloud
It's a long article, but here seem to be the relevant parts:

Facebook researchers started the project by compiling the most frequent
responses people had to posts: “haha,” “LOL,” and “omg so funny” all went in
the laughter category, for instance. Emojis with eyes that transformed into
hearts, GIF animations with hearts beating out of chests, and “luv u” went in
the love category. Then they boiled those categories into six common
responses, which Facebook calls Reactions: angry, sad, wow, haha, yay, and
love.

Facebook Reactions won’t get rid of like—it will be an extension. Within the
company, there was some debate on how to add the options without making every
post look crowded with things to click. The simpler Facebook is to use, the
more people will use it. Zuckerberg had a solution: Just display the usual
thumbs-up button under each post, but if someone on her smartphone presses
down on it a little longer, the other options will reveal themselves. Cox’s
team went with that and added animation to clarify their meaning, making the
yellow emojis bounce and change expression. The angry one turns red, looking
downward in rage, for example. Once people click their responses, the posts in
News Feed show a tally of how many wows, hahas, and loves each generated.

edit: Yay was rejected as a choice.

~~~
MicroBerto
Thanks for the summary.

Obviously, given the near six billion dollars they made, they know what
they're doing. But....

This doesn't fix anything currently making Facebook suck. It makes it noisier.

My solution would be a _tagging_ system. People can add tags (that don't even
need to be shown by default), and other friends' feeds can be filtered by the
tags.

For instance: This is a baby pic? Tag it as baby. In my feed, I will _never_
need to see another baby again.

Other people don't like politics or football. They can get tagged as such, and
ignored by those who don't like those topics.

This would absolutely positively fix Facebook for me. They are smart enough to
make it work. No more babies PLEASE!!!

~~~
nemothekid
Given how YouTube's tagging system eventually ended up working , and twitters
current one I suspect tags won't function like you envision #reply #hn
#hackers #yc #apple #eatingdinner

~~~
ta6334
Image recognition, language processing might be a good fit here.

I imagine it's on their radar considering all their interest in AI.

------
achow
The demo of the feature as shared by Chris Cox:
[https://www.facebook.com/chris.cox/videos/10101920404101583/](https://www.facebook.com/chris.cox/videos/10101920404101583/)

Looking at it I was wondering what are the chances that it would lead to
posting of an unintended reaction ("Haha" instead of "Love"). Once a reaction
is tapped on, it is gone to the wild forever. There won't be any undo.

With 'Like' button there is no chance of accident as there is nothing else.
And considering the reaction feature is being built for mobile - small screen,
distracted attention, unsteady hands, the chances of 'oops' scenario are quite
high.

~~~
gfosco
I've accidentally liked things before, and there is still an undo.. you just
tap it again or change your reaction. Do it fast enough and you'll avoid any
embarrassing broadcasts.

------
Grue3
>Zuckerberg had a solution: Just display the usual thumbs-up button under each
post, but if someone on her smartphone presses down on it a little longer, the
other options will reveal themselves.

Talk about unintuitive UI. I don't understand this recent fad of pressing
harder/longer on a button to discover a secret hidden feature that's
unavailable otherwise.

Also I liked yay the best, too bad they axed it.

~~~
swalsh
". I don't understand this recent fad of pressing harder/longer on a button to
discover a secret hidden feature that's unavailable otherwise."

No kidding, as a 28 year old I'm embarrassed to admit how long it took me to
"get" snapchat's UI.

~~~
paulmd
I read an interesting piece that argues that the confusing interface is
actually a feature. Can't find it at the moment, but it went something like:

Snapchat's confusing interface complements the way their users interact. Users
tend to learn about features from social interactions with their friends (face
to face, or digital), which builds a sense of ingroup. Additionally, the
confusing interface tends to filter out older users, who lack the social
guidance of the younger users. This keeps the userbase heavily skewed young,
which further reinforces its branding as a fun app for the cool kids. After
all, nothing is less cool than your mom doing the things you like.

I'm not sure that this is what the company wants (they've had screenshots of a
redesigned UI leak this week), but it makes logical sense to me.

~~~
peterjmag
Was it this one?
[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/01/...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/01/snapchat_why_teens_favorite_app_makes_the_facebook_generation_feel_old.html)

------
vkb
The really interesting takeaway from this article for me was that product
executives make many decisions based on simple intuition, industry experience,
and "I've heard it worked over there."

There are numerous mentions of failed product roll-outs(News Feed as a failure
at first, Paper, etc.) But the key quote is here, when they talk about the
meeting: "Cox agrees. 'My intuition, which we could prove wrong, is people
just want more stuff.'

I'm sure that Facebook uses data to back up some of its assertions; after all,
they did mine comments to come up with the most common reactions. But how many
people's entire internet experience (i.e. consumption of news through the News
Feed) is impacted just by some senior guy in a room going, "This sounds right
to me," and everyone scrambling to work on what he proposes?

~~~
pcurve
"But how many people's entire internet experience (i.e. consumption of news
through the News Feed) is impacted just by some senior guy in a room going,
"This sounds right to me,"

Like senior exec of IT buying into enterprise solutions that sound good on
paper and make everyone's life living hell. "Business people will be able to
make programming changes without developers using visio diagram!"

~~~
erichocean
"Business people will be able to make financial calculations without
developers using a graphical spreadsheet!"

 _Like that 'll ever happen._ Senior execs of IT are so stupid, amiright?

Everyone knows only programmers should be doing financial calculations with a
computer, and that UIs are for losers. /s

~~~
kalleboo
Actually maybe they shouldn't...
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/02/13/microsoft...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/02/13/microsofts-
excel-might-be-the-most-dangerous-software-on-the-planet/)

------
abakker
I imagine this will make their sentiment analysis better. Hopefully, it will
be weighted sufficiently highly in the newsfeed algorithm that I can start to
exert some control on the newsfeed again. I can mostly keep my feed relevant
by blocking whole sites (huffpo, buzzfeed, etc), but it would be nice if
Facebook knew when individual posts hit a "breakout" status and could appear
in my feed again.

On the other hand, ion they use this too heavily, then the newsfeed becomes a
serious echo chamber, where it is not only correlated to your friend group,
but also to your "optimal" emotional reaction. Might be great for Facebook to
sell more ads, but not necessarily great for the end user.

------
jawns
Slack's Reactji -- which lets you use any standard or custom emoji as a
reaction -- is significantly more useful than Facebook's very limited set of
options, _and_ it came first.

You would think that after seeing how well received the Slack Reactji are,
Facebook would have expanded its available options.

I can understand not venturing into custom emoji, but at least let there be a
:pile-of-poo: reaction! After all, it's an election year!

~~~
criley2
You can put emoji in a comment for similar effect.

The facebook system allows a few critical things:

\- a simple tally of reactions. With an open-ended set of emoji, it's a bit
silly to tally emoji responses. With 6 options, the tallies are interesting.

\- advertising. These six actions are a known quantity and can be baked into
their advertising and display algorithms at every level. Using emoji, you'd
have to build some kind of emoji-emotion-algorithm which classifies the use of
all emoji in real time to a small set of factors for use in the algorithm

But yeah nothing is stopping you from filling up facebook messages and
comments with :poo: emoji and stickers and gifs.

~~~
acdha
> \- a simple tally of reactions. With an open-ended set of emoji, it's a bit
> silly to tally emoji responses. With 6 options, the tallies are interesting.

Slack's implementation is worth using to question whether of your speculated
problems would actually be significant. It updates the tallies in real-time
and requires only a single click to increment the count. Although people could
use any emoji, in practice there are only a small percentage which are
relevant and people tend to add to previous ones rather than add a random new
one.

> \- advertising. These six actions are a known quantity and can be baked into
> their advertising and display algorithms at every level. Using emoji, you'd
> have to build some kind of emoji-emotion-algorithm which classifies the use
> of all emoji in real time to a small set of factors for use in the algorithm

If an advertiser was trying to do this, they'd have to do all of that work
either way – the only difference is the size of the lookup table. I think
they'd be more worried about trying to gauge the target of the reaction – e.g.
if I post something about politics and you use the angry reaction, it's much
harder for a machine to tell whether you disagreed with me or were directing
some righteous indignation at the subject of the story and that's the most
valuable bit of info to know for deciding which candidate or party's ad to
show.

~~~
criley2
I think it's far more than "the size of the lookup table" because that implies
that each emoji has one purpose (like the Facebook 5 have one purpose).

Facebook's five choices are clear and universal human emotions that leave very
little room for subjectivity.

Emoji, on the other hand, are used as a famously arcane new language where
each symbol has many potential uses, as a pictogram in conjunction with
others, or as multiple uses per emoji, as viral "inside" jokes meaning
completely different things than depicted (tree, fire, or pineapple are often
used to mean a drug, but how do you know when a tree symbol means a drug and
when it means a pine tree?) "X_X face" is often used to mean sexytimes, but
the X_X emoji is also used to mean exasperation.

Sad, happy, angry, these are simple to work with.

But how do you classify Back-Button? What does a user think of a post when
they rate it "Alien-Face". When they use "Skull/Crossbone" are they saying
danger/poison, or death, or Halloween, costumes, a movie?

I'm not sure you could ever get to an adequate level of programmatically
understanding the intent behind emoji, but I think that it's not too difficult
with 5 universal emotions.

~~~
acdha
I'm not disagreeing that it's more work but that even with only a few options,
this problem is dwarfed by the question of intention, which is what
advertisers really want to know. “angry face” might seem universal at first
glance but it's not easy to tell who the anger is directed at, which is what
advertisers would want. Even the binary Like has this problem where you don't
know if someone liked a story, like the way a reporter smacked down the
subject of the story, or the comment your friend made when they shared news
about someone you dislike.

Besides, if Facebook only designed things for advertisers every post would
have a mandatory form collecting demographic info. They know they have to make
using the service enjoyable and this would be an easy way to boost interaction
which doesn't make advertising fundamentally harder.

------
wuliwong
It's funny they compare this to "Coca-Cola messing with its secret recipe"
which Coke did and it was not a success.

~~~
matt4077
The Coke recipe has changed significantly over time. It also varies by country
(i.e. HFCS in the US, cane sugar in South America) and serving method (syrup
etc).

------
surds
The article sort of took a tangential direction from Reactions and went into
Chris Cox's story. It was an interesting read, just that it would have been a
better article had it been profiling him, instead of bundling it up here.

Good to have actual reactions anyways. "Someone announces her divorce on the
site, and friends grit their teeth and 'like' it." Such cases are everybody's
life events and there were no reactions to share unless you comment.

------
taytus
"He’s not a billionaire, just a centi-millionaire." I stopped reading right
there.

------
Digit-Al
I wish they'd devote the same sort of attention to making a usable mobile app
instead of the bloated monstrosity that exists now.

------
rconti
I wonder if tourists will be able to choose from a number of different signs
to stand in front of at Facebook HQ now.

------
orthoganol
This feels like changing something just to change something, maybe because
some executive wants to feel they're doing something important. Is there some
unspoken rule in tech that you have to change things every so often, no matter
what?

------
egypturnash
They missed an important emotion: "disgustedly rolling one's eyes". That's my
reaction to a lot of the posts I scroll past and don't interact with.

------
wallacoloo
If my memory serves me, DeviantArt had something similar to this around a
decade ago, and I thought it worked very well. It's an entirely different
platform though. Also, I don't remember them having such annoying animations,
nor omitting such basic emotions as "joy" because "people don't understand
it".

D|A appears to have axed this system though, for whatever reason. I hope it
works out better for Facebook.

------
5ersi
Like button has nothing to do with people liking something.

It has everything to do with Facebook tracking users on 3rd party web pages.
This way they know where you have been, for how long and how often. IMO this
data is much more relevant to knowing users interests that enables FB to sell
targeted ads.

Same goes for Google Analytics: that's the reason it is free - because you are
the product.

------
obiefernandez
"On a Wednesday in November, he enters a conference room for the second of
five meetings and confesses that he’s breaking the rules: Executives are
discouraged from scheduling meetings on Wednesdays, which is supposed to be a
day engineers and designers can work without interruption."

Mind blown. What a great idea to ban meetings on Wednesdays!

------
wilnerm13
Interesting to see Facebook make these types of decisions. They're in an
interesting position because as much as they want to react to emerging
behaviors to create for a great user experience, they're one of the few
companies that has the ability to manufacture new behaviors on their platform.

------
rplnt
Summary of the article? 2 paragraphs in and I have no idea what it is going to
be about.

~~~
dyeje
It's more of a piece about this Cox guy who's been spearheading the change.
Anyways, the change is:

Replace the Like with Reactions. There are 6 reactions you can choose from:
angry, sad, wow, haha, yay, and love.

~~~
padobson
Looks like they reduced it to 5, because yay was not universally understood.

~~~
fryguy
Seems silly, since it's the most appropriate thing for lots of posts that
don't fit into the other categories, like "Just got promoted", "I won $500 at
the casino today", "My son just got first place at pinewood derby", "Just
finished the last chapter for Winds of Winter it's going to the editors now",
etc.

------
peterburkimsher
Facebook (and Twitter) keep trying to "innovate" by changing what they do
well. Why not add a new feature, like bold/italic/underline text?

------
amelius
By the way, does Facebook have a patent (or other IP-protection) on the "like"
button? Just wondering.

------
Bronobody
CIA probably needed finer grained data points.

------
anonbanker
Buried at the bottom:

"Cox says Reactions’ biggest test so far was during the November terrorist
attacks in Paris. Users in the test countries had options other than like, and
they used them. “It just felt different to use Facebook that day,” he says."

Does this disturb anyone else?

~~~
icosahedronman
why would it be disturbing ?

~~~
anonbanker
"Never let a good tragedy go to waste" is the quote I was thinking of.

Knowing that there was a national tragedy happening, Facebook takes advantage
of _all that great data_ coming from their french users.

it's disgusting. and the fact that I'm in a minority on HN that feels this way
is pretty disgusting.

