from Hacker News

Facebook Reactions

by septerr on 10/8/15, 7:43 PM with 100 comments

  • by gkoberger on 10/8/15, 10:41 PM

    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.

  • by camillomiller on 10/8/15, 9:09 PM

    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...

  • by minimaxir on 10/8/15, 9:26 PM

    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.

  • by frofroggy on 10/8/15, 9:46 PM

    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.

  • by msoad on 10/8/15, 9:21 PM

    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.

  • by kzhahou on 10/8/15, 10:10 PM

    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!

  • by acheron on 10/8/15, 11:08 PM

    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"...)

  • by Canada on 10/8/15, 9:43 PM

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

  • by TazeTSchnitzel on 10/8/15, 9:22 PM

    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.

  • by crabasa on 10/8/15, 9:10 PM

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

  • by grovulent on 10/9/15, 2:35 AM

    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.

  • by orbifold on 10/8/15, 10:09 PM

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

  • by raymondgh on 10/8/15, 10:23 PM

    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.

  • by myth_buster on 10/8/15, 9:32 PM

    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.

  • by worldofsofte on 10/8/15, 9:56 PM

    Innovation by some of the world's better engineers.

  • by RyanZAG on 10/8/15, 10:19 PM

    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?

  • by eigenbom on 10/8/15, 10:03 PM

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

  • by dang on 10/8/15, 10:21 PM

  • by anjc on 10/8/15, 9:37 PM

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

  • by NoGravitas on 10/9/15, 12:02 PM

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

  • by tdkl on 10/9/15, 12:19 AM

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

  • by feider on 10/8/15, 9:47 PM

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

  • by guelo on 10/8/15, 11:25 PM

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

  • by discardorama on 10/8/15, 10:00 PM

    .... aaaand Facebook's MySpacification begins.

  • by redbrick on 10/8/15, 9:10 PM

    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.

  • by Shish2k on 10/8/15, 9:21 PM

    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

  • by hockeybias on 10/8/15, 9:18 PM

    Caring...