Facebook didn’t just choose these new emotions randomly, of course. As Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox explains in a post introducing the new feature: Cox also posted a video showing off the new feature, which you can see embedded at the bottom of this post. The fact that Facebook’s new “Reactions,” don’t include an overt “Dislike” button may be disappointing to those who clamored for that specific option, but the move does show an acknowledgment that the monolithic “Like” button is profoundly limiting when it comes to the actual emotions people want to share. Facebook posts about personal disappointments, annoyances, illnesses, tragedies, frustrations, or other challenges in life have never been a good fit for the “Like” button (not to mention your uncle’s crazy political rants). While this new feature does some to address that obvious fact, the lack of a “Dislike,” or other disapproval mechanism, shows that Facebook doesn’t want to provide tools that make it easier for users to berate one another, at least not any outside of the good old fashioned written comments (which, incidentally, have also supported emoji on Facebook for quite some time). But, as the saying goes: haters gonna hate.
