People have been begging Facebook for a dislike button ever since the inception of the social media giant but to no avail. It’s time we retire the non existent dislike button to that category of ideas that would have been great if they were brought to fruition. But we may get the next best thing: Reactions was announced last year.
As I write this Facebook is rolling out “Facebook Reactions” globally. Instead of getting the dislike button we instead get five different emoji based Reactions that you can select instead of the like button. Those Reactions are “haha,” “love,” “wow,” “sad” and “anger.” The iconic like button will remain as well but you will only be able to choose one Reaction per post, so you won’t be able to “like” and show that you “love” something.
Originally there were six buttons; however the “yay” reaction was removed after it proved to be a problem because it was “not universally understood” according to a spokesperson. I guess it proved redundant when you already had “like” option.
Facebook have been testing the feature for a couple of months in Spain and Ireland, not due to the high popularity of the app in those countries but due to the fact that users in those countries don’t have many Facebook friends abroad, effectively making them safe testing grounds for new features.
The global roll out comes after Facebook released its astonishing Q4
Edit – 24/02/2016
Facebook Reactions are available globally as of February 24 2016. To use a Reaction, hover over the like button on the browser, or hold down on the like button on the mobile apps so as to see the different reactions.
