
Facebook Reactions - septerr
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/vb.4/10102412343501081/?type=2&theater
======
gkoberger
Why all the negativity here? You can still like things, comment with text, or
just not use Facebook. Nobody will ever be forced to use these emoticons, and
nobody at Facebook is saying you can only express these 6 emotions while using
Facebook.

I also don't get why everyone feels FB owes them a dislike button. It seems
like _that_ would be a bad feature.

Personally, I think it's a good change. It won't change Facebook much, but it
certainly won't do harm.

~~~
evolve2k
I think the frustration is that around a month ago Zuckaberg himself was
hitting the media to drum up speculation, "Is it time to add a dislike
button". I think it's more a matter of failure to deliver on said hype as
expected.

Simply, for around a month we've been challenged to consider, is a dislike
button something you might use? "Ok I suppose YES". Well then here's the new
features. "Wait?! Where the dislike button you mentioned?". "Dislike! And crap
that reminds me you didn't add the dislike button I want to use right now to
dislike that you left the button out!!"

~~~
gkoberger
He can't control what the media writes. For example, the article was titled
"Facebook working on 'dislike' button, Zuckerberg says", but here's the actual
quotes from that exact article:

"It's important to give people more options than just 'like'" to help express
empathy and sympathy, Zuckerberg said. "Not every moment is a good moment."

"Some people have asked for a dislike button because they want to say, 'That
thing isn't good.' And that’s not something that we think is good for the
world. So we’re not going to build that," Zuckerberg said at the time.

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/09/15/facebook-
worki...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/09/15/facebook-working-
dislike-button-mark-zuckerberg-says/72320136/)

~~~
evolve2k
I think you may have missed my point. I was addressing your comment "I also
don't get why everyone feels FB owes them a dislike button. It seems like that
would be a bad feature."

I don't like the idea of a dislike button myself but was commenting that
unfulfilled expectation was the thing that lead the peanut brigade to whining.

------
camillomiller
People wanted a dislike button, got a series of redundant emoticons with very
little space for actual disagreement. Which is actually good, because it won't
transform Facebook into a mess of flames and negativity. Wait, maybe it's
already too late for that...

~~~
austenallred
Facebook doesn't want to encourage contention and negative emotions? Seems
logical to me.

You remember how you feel when you use a product. When I comment on HN I feel
like I'm standing before a military tribunal that is trying to pick apart
everything I say and find a way to disagree with it. When I use Facebook I
feel nothing but love and appreciation from the people I know and care about.

You may think that's lame or that you're above that, but I deal with enough
shit in the rest of my life that I don't mind having a cushy place online to
communicate with the people who care about me. And I'll even put up with
Buzzfeed and email-forward-worthy garbage to do so.

On a macro scale I think that's something the world needs badly. I think most
people could do with a little more love and positivity in their lives.

~~~
plaguuuuuu
>trying to pick apart everything I say and find a way to disagree with it.

We're totally not.

~~~
Mz
Ironically, you are so proving his point for him.

~~~
monkey_slap
That's the joke.

~~~
Mz
I was aware it was potentially a joke. HN is mostly not very welcoming of
jokes and that sort of joke, where the point is to irritate someone expressing
their frustration, is a type that I think is mostly not nice and generally
does not work well on a large forum. It can be an okay thing in a small group
of trusted friends. Even in small groups, the odds are high that it amounts to
just assholery and disrespect. It gets worse the larger the group.

So, I think it still merely proves the point being made above it, regardless
of its supposed intent to be funny at someone's expense.

------
minimaxir
Anyone remember YouTube Reactions? Died because no one used them.

Hell, even _BuzzFeed_ , the pioneer of reaction culture, implemented Reactions
but are slowly depreciating them.

~~~
degenerate
The problem is that you can't aggregate them. 1 Like and 4 dislikes = "20%
like this". What are you going to do with a bunch of faces to show consensus?
And which of those faces am I supposed to use to say _this post is filled with
misinformation and you shouldn 't be spreading it_ ... Angry? Sad?

~~~
joshuahutt
Why can't you just have a generic face and a series of mutations for each of
the reactions, and then average among the mutations?

It wouldn't really work, but it might be one of those features that drives
more engagement because it's "unintentionally" funny.

~~~
TranquilMarmot
Like Super Mario 64? [https://youtu.be/Nn-Rz6lBGW0](https://youtu.be/Nn-
Rz6lBGW0)

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frofroggy
I wonder if they chose the angry reaction to follow the nonviolent
communication pattern: <emotion> due to <specific action leading to emotion>
followed by <need hindered by action> followed by <specific request to meet
the need>.

For example, "I felt angry when you wrote that any realistic web browser has
to support Javascript. I have a need for using a text browser to bypass abuses
of Javascript on websites with articles, so I would like you to view <specific
article> with both w3m and Firefox."

The "dislike" action would not fit the nonviolent communication pattern.

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msoad
I've seen this in a developer phone. The downside is "number of likes" will be
lower because those other emotions are not counted as "likes" and there is no
indicator of how many total reactions you got. Of course you can add it up but
it's not calculated by default.

~~~
joshuahutt
I think it would make more sense to aggregate the count of all reactions,
then.

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kzhahou
I've really enjoyed being able to congratulate friends on the birth of their
children or their birthdays, with just one click. Super excited to be able to
send one-click condolences now!

------
acheron
Livejournal's "mood icons" were the first thing I thought of.

(Though the standing joke with LJ was that they could save space by
eliminating all the mood icons except for "angsty"...)

~~~
pdx6
Same here, and I think that may have been the idea. One of the things I loved
about LJ was the ability to set moods, nested commenting, and a community
spirit. Mood likes, better commenting, and Groups have started to adopt this
LJ spirit (as much as don't want to admit).

------
Canada
Wow I'm so excited that I can now express myself with a range of Facebook
approved emotions!

~~~
Jonanin
Dismayed that middlebrow dismissals like this still reign supreme on HN, this
seems like a cheap shot comment. Obviously you can express yourself however
you wish on Facebook through comments, pictures, etc; they've actually
broadened your options for doing so here.

~~~
hoopd
I'm not sure it's a middlebrow dismissal, it's well-timed sarcasm which points
to an important issue: Facebook deciding which emotions and expressions are
first class citizens and which aren't is troubling.

~~~
Forlien
Are there any chats that don't do this? How would you have implemented it?

~~~
jfoutz
It's a little more subtle. and subtle is the point. Human emotion, heck, all
of human experience is analog. Love for a child is different than love for a
parent, for example. And it's fractally complicated. If you look at how a
word, phrase or novel matches up to an emotion you'll see the flaws where it
doesn't quite match up at every scale.

So, anyway, discretizing these 6 states and fast tracking them is ok, i guess.
It certainly allows people to shade their like in an interesting way, but it
blows away complexity. The simple like can convey more meaning, imho, based on
the sender. A like from an ex-lover, for example has a different meaning than
from grandma. In some sense, they're both "i'm thinking of you" but they're
nuanced based on sender.

It's not super clear to me that providing the 6 states will actually convey
more information. Really it just requires a bit more effort on the user. A guy
hits like on a pretty girl's photo because of love or lust, same guy hits like
on a fast car because of awe. The context is more than enough to infer the
meaning. It does make the sympathy connection explicit, so that's something.
The sad face is probably much quicker than typing in "sucks about the cancer,
bro". Is optimizing that case for speed better for humans?

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TazeTSchnitzel
Reminds me of Slack's emoji responses to messages. Alas, we don't have quite
as much flexibility here. Being able to respond to things with sneks is fun.

------
crabasa
And not even a courtesy hat tip to Slack. Tsk tsk.

~~~
alexhaar
To be fair -- the hat tip should probably go to Path.

~~~
kzhahou
No. Slack has innovated literally every advancement in chat for the last 20
years.

~~~
Shank
That's not the right use of literally, and at best, is a good use of
hyperbole. 20 years is a long time. 20 years ago, SMS wasn't a thing, and IRC
and internet chatrooms were more popular. As time goes on, you have things
like MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, etc. Emoji were invented after 20 years ago.

~~~
kzhahou
Oh, I know what literally means, my friend :-)

But your reply literally made my head explode.

------
grovulent
I'm genuinely trying to understand how this has any significance at all. They
are implementing emoticons - all of which could be expressed in other ways on
the platform (in a comment etc).

The only thing that changes is that now facebook will be able to explicitly
map the emoticon expression to the posted content - something that humans
could do already given the contextual clues in the use of an emoticon in a
comment.

Generally, people "like" the person far more than the like the content (i.e.
it's various aspects of the person, e.g. status, that are primarily causal
with respect to others wanting to click that 'like' button.) My prediction is
that people will be unlikely to use these extra buttons because they confuse
this essential signalling game. A 'wow' emoticon, for example - can often be
ambiguous as to whether or not you are aligning with the recipient, or
signalling negatively toward them. Thus folks will struggle with the fear of
sending the wrong signal.

If facebook persists and people do start using them - then the result will be
a greater number of signalling failures, increased conflict, and greater user
dissatisfaction.

------
orbifold
I wonder if one of the new options simply gets adopted as "dislike" by
convention, maybe Yay would be a good candidate.

~~~
arasmussen
Why would Yay get adopted as "dislike"? Something like angry or sad would make
way more sense. It'd be incredibly hard to create this culture in 1.4B people
when the UI indicates otherwise. Perhaps among younger audiences? I'm still
very skeptical.

~~~
orbifold
I associate and would use Yay only as an ironic expressions of excitement, as
in "Two more weeks of working overtime, yay", but I have only found a
discussion in an catholic forum as evidence that some people think the same
way.

I don't believe I have ever heard someone use "Yay" in a non ironic fashion,
but I'm not from an english speaking country.

So you could easily imagine a situation where posts by popular kids would get
likes but posts by outsiders only yays.

~~~
davnicwil
English-speaker here (UK) - just to let you know that Yay! is very definitely
used in a non-ironic fashion all the time as a light-hearted, perhaps slightly
jokey, expression of delight. In text, and sometimes even in speech.

I can 'calibrate' a Yay to indicate a negative sentiment based on context, but
it's a bit jarring and not even very strongly negative. Examples like "Two
more weeks of working overtime. Yay" is obviously a negative use _but_ , to
me, that's you indicating disapproval of a fairly trivial inconvenience or
annoyance in a rather light-hearted way. If you really disliked something I'd
expect a more direct statement like 'damn it' or your whatever your chosen
flavour of profanity.

The idea of Yay as a general meme for negativity is very jarring, at least to
this native reader, and I'd really struggle to imagine it ever catching on as
a result. Hope you found this perspective useful!

------
raymondgh
I liked the insightful/interesting/informative/funny on slashdot, maybe this
will work out like that. Anyway, why not test a new feature? I see a lot of
cynical comments here. And since when does Zuckerberg announce new features
from his fb account? That's pretty cool.

------
myth_buster
Would just clicking on the "Like" button consider it as like or would the
users have to hold press and select "Like"?

If someone has already selected "Wow", "Sad" or something similar, it perhaps
would be useful to just click on the icon next to aggregation rather than
doing the long-press behavior.

I suppose on the desktop site, perhaps mouseover may show the reactions.

I think overall it requires more effort on the user's part as opposed to just
clicking on the like button and moving on. Which perhaps was the reason for
the like button's initial success.

~~~
eridius
It's probably safe to assume that tapping the "Like" button will still like
it, and you have to long-press to get reactions (since that's what the video
seemed to show). On desktop, it's less clear what the appropriate interaction
metaphor is; maybe hover shows you the other options, but clicking still just
Likes it?

------
worldofsofte
Innovation by some of the world's better engineers.

~~~
Sven7
I have just been reading the front page Reddit thread, where soldiers are
talking about the pointlessness of the Afghan War (can't believe its been 14
years) and the difficulty of coming back home and dealing with first world
problems.

And then I see this Facebook stuff at the top of all the tech
news...sigh...how did we get here? I have no idea.

~~~
hmate9
Because everyone has a facebook and so everyone can be part of the
conversation. Everyone feels involved in this. People want to be distracted.
I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing, only why dumb news is always
more popular than "actual" news.

------
RyanZAG
They added 'angry' ? That looks very much the same as 'dislike' to me. He
doesn't bring it up in his message either so it was probably a late addition.

I have a feeling 'angry' will be used whenever you don't like what someone is
saying: it's the same thing?

~~~
MichaelGG
Angry's for when someone posts something bad, like "Boss fired me for not
sleeping with him".

If you use Angry for dislike, you're inviting mockery. "Oh, this got you
angry? haha loser".

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eigenbom
I look forward to Facebook Actions. Instead of just poking imagine what else
you can do..

~~~
TranquilMarmot
Like send a message containing actual text and an emoticon?

------
dang
Also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10356539](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10356539).

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anjc
My Facebook newsfeed looks very childish with these icons dotted throughout.
It's horrible, and I don't think it could be rolled out.

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NoGravitas
My main gripe with this is they didn't include the two main reactions I have
to Facebook posts: _cringe_ and _gulag_.

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tdkl
Is it possible to see the list who reacted with a certain emoji or is this
only as it was with likes?

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feider
Could we just agree that /P symbolizes a downward thumb. No need for the
dislike button.

~~~
myth_buster
How about 9

------
guelo
I wonder what this does to the "your friend liked this" advertising.

------
discardorama
.... aaaand Facebook's MySpacification begins.

------
redbrick
Brilliant! The design kept the primary operation to be the like. And,
elegantly provides an 'advanced' secondary operation for those that want a
more nuanced expression.

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Shish2k
For disagreement, write a comment explaining /why/ you disagree.

(It's similar to HN's policy* of "prefer discussion to downvotes")

* EDIT: I mean culture; as in I've seen it mentioned a lot by users of the site, though it's not in the rules

~~~
dang
> _It 's similar to HN's policy of "prefer discussion to downvotes"_

HN has never had any such policy.

Edit: We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10356268](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10356268)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
SquirrelOnFire
Policy? Maybe not, but the apparent lack of downvote buttons seem to indicate
that the ethos of "discussion over downvotes" is on the mark.

~~~
baddox
Not everyone lacks downvote buttons. I have them. I don't know how you get
them, but I assume it's related to account age and/or karma.

~~~
Mithaldu
Looking at the responses to the parent, i wish there was also a "mark comment
as duplicate" button. Maybe i still lack the karma!

~~~
baddox
Yeah, that's unfortunate. I clicked Reply when there were no replies, but by
the time I composed my reply there were several others.

------
hockeybias
Caring...

