Facebook Reactions
facebook.comWhy 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.
It's easy to hate on FB when the impact is minimal for each user and not really felt too consciously.
On the aggregate, however, I see it as a horrendously difficult feature to design adequately.
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!!"
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...
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.
Even when Zuckerberg said that, I think he had made clear that he wanted something for the situations where "liking" is not appropriate. I still think that ignoring is much better than disliking.
Agreed. TLDR Media Hype led to unfufilled expectation leading to whingers.
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...
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.
>trying to pick apart everything I say and find a way to disagree with it.
We're totally not.
Ironically, you are so proving his point for him.
That's the joke.
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.
Well, the purpose of Reactions isn't to "provide a dislike button" like a lot of people wanted.
The purpose of reactions is to provide an alternative for people who don't want to click "Like" on stories of tragedy (e.g. someone's loved one dying, someone announcing they have cancer, or even something non-personal like a news article about a mass shooting) because it sounds inappropriate, like "ha ha, I'm enjoying your tragedy!". There are two reasons why this is important:
1. Some people want to exhibit support but don't know what to say, so they're not comfortable commenting. On more positive stories, they'll just hit "Like", but that would feel inappropriate to do on a more negative story, so they don't do anything even though they want to express their support.
2. Facebook's News Feed algorithm uses Likes to determine how articles are sorted in your News Feed. If people don't Like important stories because they feel the word "Like" is inappropriate, then those stories will be downranked because the algorithm doesn't know the stories are supposed to be important.
Reactions solve both by allowing people to both wordlessly express sympathy for and signal-boost stories that they feel would be inappropriate to "Like".
> "ha ha, I'm enjoying your tragedy!"
That's not the semantics of the Like button however. The Like button's semantics, as used by most people, are "I have read your post, don't have anything meaningful to add, and agree with you and/or express my post-appropriate social action but do not feel affected enough or close enough to you on the social graph to leave a comment."
The meaning of a Like is extremely contextual. And most people know this.
Granted, a lot of newbie users get confused.
But the word "like" has connotations and it looks _awful_ to have a post with someone pouring their heart out about a tragedy and then have "Janine and 99 others like this" directly below it.
Does having only positive emotions to virtually express causes a global mood raising or quite the opposite ? with HN local samples it seems neither, only sarcasm.
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.
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?
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.
Like Super Mario 64? https://youtu.be/Nn-Rz6lBGW0
My guess as to what FB will do: treat them all as a "like" with respect to engagement statistics (i.e. do we show this post to more people?)
And simultaneously, use all the emotions to train a ridiculously good sentiment analysis system.
This. They should have worked harder to get useful customer information, that would also benefit the reader. Easily done using multiple scales: Like <-->Dislike Spam <--> More of this, and so on.
They worked well on Path and Slack
Emoticons are different than "engagement" buttons, unless you are talking about a feature I don't know about.
There are so called "reaction" buttons in Slack, easy to add with "Add a reaction" menu item on a message.
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.
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.
I think it would make more sense to aggregate the count of all reactions, then.
That's probably just a matter of time before they add the different emoticons to their algorithms.
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!
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"...)
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).
Wow I'm so excited that I can now express myself with a range of Facebook approved emotions!
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.
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.
Are there any chats that don't do this? How would you have implemented it?
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?
"Everybody else is doing it" isn't doing it for me right now. Facebook has ~1.4 billion monthly active users and, somehow, no real competitors at the moment.
Facebook's COO, Sheryl Sandberg, has tried in the past to change how society functions by limiting vocabulary[0].
Facebook's product is their userbase, they make money by monetizing their userbase.
Ideally there would be enough competing chat/message services that you could always switch when you're unhappy. That's not the case here. Facebook has an enormous amount of power over how the world communicates and I think the intentional and unintentional effects of any bias they introduce should be discussed.
No, you can't be excited. You can be wowed by it, though.
So reaction!
Much emotion
Eventually we'll be back to being able to communicate the full breadth of human emotions! And then we'll need someone to invent another 'like' button, so we can sufficiently simplify our social workloads again...
There seems to be a cyclicality to it. We know too many people (see Dunbar's number [0]), we're fed too much information, we're overwhelmed. So invent Twitter, to reduce the amount of information coming in, invent Facebook, make it easier to maintain social connections with ever-more people. And then realise there are limitations to this, so Twitter starts a blogging service, and Facebook adds 'reactions', and now we're back where we started, no?
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.
And not even a courtesy hat tip to Slack. Tsk tsk.
To be fair -- the hat tip should probably go to Path.
No. Slack has innovated literally every advancement in chat for the last 20 years.
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.
Oh, I know what literally means, my friend :-)
But your reply literally made my head explode.
SMS was a thing 20 years ago. Wiki says first SMS message was sent in 1992, and development went far back (beyond IRC).
Agreed. They don't get enough credit to be honest.
I can tell that you're trying to be sarcastic, but I've heard enough good things about Slack that it was hard to catch.
If you're not being sarcastic... well, I think Shank summed it up pretty well.
Lookit, I love Slack. Used it extensively in a huge team.
But I do get tired of the constant thing around HN whenever a company releases some new feature, people immediately post a "Well, credit should really go to XYZ who did it first".
Sometimes the other company did launch a similar feature first, sometimes the features aren't that similar, and more often than not, everyone is copying from everyone. (and that's ok)
HipChat?
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.
I wonder if one of the new options simply gets adopted as "dislike" by convention, maybe Yay would be a good candidate.
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.
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.
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!
"Angry" will probably fit "dislike"...
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.
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.
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?
Innovation by some of the world's better engineers.
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.
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.
If you want to read about the Afghan war and things like that, tech news sites aren't the place. Of course tech news sites are full of Facebook news.
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?
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".
I look forward to Facebook Actions. Instead of just poking imagine what else you can do..
Like send a message containing actual text and an emoticon?
My Facebook newsfeed looks very childish with these icons dotted throughout. It's horrible, and I don't think it could be rolled out.
My main gripe with this is they didn't include the two main reactions I have to Facebook posts: cringe and gulag.
Is it possible to see the list who reacted with a certain emoji or is this only as it was with likes?
Could we just agree that /P symbolizes a downward thumb. No need for the dislike button.
How about 9
I wonder what this does to the "your friend liked this" advertising.
.... aaaand Facebook's MySpacification begins.
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.
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
> 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 and marked it off-topic.
I mean HN the community rather than HN the website (As in, every time I've seen a meta-discussion about the HN voting system, something along those lines has been mentioned; though I guess that's more "culture" than "policy")
That view isn't HN's culture. Yes it always gets mentioned, but so does the opposite view. The community is divided.
To the extent that HN itself has a policy it was set years ago by pg saying that downvoting for disagreement is ok.
> pg saying that downvoting for disagreement is ok.
I'm surprised I've not heard that before; but either way, I guess I stand thoroughly corrected, and will know better in future. Thank you for replying to explain my error and not just downvoting :)
People have asked for discussion rather than down votes when they know a point they've written is controversial. But that's for very few posts.
Policy? Maybe not, but the apparent lack of downvote buttons seem to indicate that the ethos of "discussion over downvotes" is on the mark.
Try reading the FAQ:
Since your account was created 5 minutes ago, you lack the karma to downvote.Why don't I see down arrows? There are no down arrows on stories. They appear on comments after users reach a certain karma threshold, but never on direct replies.Downvoting is enabled once you hit 500 karma, a policy presumably meant to ensure that those most likely to contribute to a quality discussion are also the most likely to have good judgement in downvoting less quality discussion.
There is a downvote button after you have gotten some karma.
Downvote buttons become visible when you have sufficient karma to vote something down.
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.
Looking at the responses to the parent, i wish there was also a "mark comment as duplicate" button. Maybe i still lack the karma!
Yeah, that's unfortunate. I clicked Reply when there were no replies, but by the time I composed my reply there were several others.
Why should it not be possible simply by clicking?
Because there's criticism and constructive criticism; the one is easy, impersonal (in the form of downvotes or dislike buttons), and completely useless because it just goes "I don't like this" - or, in relatable terms, a Linus-ism of "This code is shit".
Instead, both the criticism-giver and the receiver are better off if you went "This code is shit, /because/ so-and so, and you can improve it in this-and-that way".
Of course, a "I like this /because/" is also more constructive than a "I like this". But I'm sure there's been plenty of examples that no matter how many "I like this"-es you get, it only takes one "this sucks, you suck" to demotivate someone.
Imagine you're at an automated restaurant. There are buttons for "order fries", "order cake", "order sandwich", and "do not order pie". Can you see why the last button in that list is not as useful as the first three?
Positive sentiment needs no explanation because it inherits the context of the thing it is agreeing with; negative sentiment needs explanation else it is somewhere between useless and nonsense.
I don't have enough karma to downvote you, so I'm replying to you to tell you that everything you posted is a load of hogwash and your analogy is bad.
Of course negative sentiment also "inherits the context of the thing it is (dis)agreeing with."
You glean just as much information from someone clicking Like and leaving no context as you do someone clicking Dislike and leaving no context.
> You glean just as much information from someone clicking Like and leaving no context as you do someone clicking Dislike and leaving no context.
I disagree; Perhaps a programming analogy instead?
if(x == 0) # when this is true, you know what x is, and what it isn't
if(x != 0) # when this is true, you only know what x isn't
Like with no context tells the receiver what the audience wants (more of the same); dislike doesn't (okay, so don't do this thing, but do what instead?).
That's what I mean by the analogy - "do this" is a much more useful statement than "don't do that".
Caring...