Mark Zuckerberg has outed his team as ‘thinking’ about adding a dislike button to the social network, but it needs to be positive.
The Facebook CEO was speaking at a Q&A at U.C.Davis, and responded to a law student who asked whether such a feature would ever land.
Zuckerberg conceded that the ‘like’ button isn’t always appropriate, for instance when a status involved something to do with sickness or death,
“There are things in people’s lives that are sad, or that are tragic, and people don’t want to like them. We’ve talked about, for a while, how people express a wider range of emotions, like surprise.”
Despite the like button’s flaws, Zuckerberg is still a firm backer of its primacy.
“The like button is valuable because it’s a quick way to share a positive sentiment,” said the Harvard drop-out.
“Some people have asked for a dislike button so they can say something isn’t good, and we’re not going to do that. I don’t think that’s good for the community.”
He then revealed that if a dislike button was added, he would make sure expressing the negative sentiment ‘ends up being a force for good.’
The Facebook community has long been championing the need for a dislike button, so this could be a glimmer of hope for the expectant masses.
Facebook already supports a number of stickers and emoticons, amongst which a ‘thumbs-down’ icon exists.
Zuckerberg had some good news yesterday after Instagram’s CEO revealed the Facebook-owned image-sharing service had finally trumped rival network Twitter.
Instagram now boasts 300 million monthly active users, edging out over Twitter’s formidable 284 million.
Read More: What can Twitter do to stop the abuse?
Via: VentureBeat