Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook may soon get a 'dislike' button

If you’ve ever stumbled across a somber post on Facebook that seems a tad too inappropriate to ‘like’, there may be another option sometime soon. In a Q&A session earlier today, co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the Facebook team is working on adding a ‘dislike’ button to its posts. Not only that, the new button may soon launch as a test sometime relatively soon.

Zuckerberg explains:

People have asked about the ‘dislike’ button for many years, and probably hundreds of people have asked about this, and today is a special day because today is the day that I actually get to say we are working on it, and are very close to shipping a test of it.

Simply adding a new button to users’ posts isn’t that easy, though. The CEO has expressed his concerns that Facebook could potentially turn into a place where users could go to up and downvote every post they see, similar to how Reddit operates. He says:

That doesn’t seem like the kind of community that we want to create: You don’t want to go through the process of sharing some moment that was important to you in your day and have someone ‘downvote’ it.

Instead, users can think of the ‘dislike’ button as a way to express empathy to their Facebook friends. Zuckerberg says the dislike interaction is surprisingly complicated to create, but the social network as a whole will soon begin testing the feature before a wider rollout takes place. There’s no word as to when we’ll see a wider rollout of the ‘dislike’ button, but it looks like it won’t be too much longer until some users get to use the widely-requested feature.