Mark Zuckerberg promised to make Facebook again large, and Meta has announced a small new feature that could be a step towards this goal.
As part of a series of features and policies aimed at reducing the contents of spam, Facebook is testing a “Downvote” button for comments. This would allow people to make comments anonymously that they deem less “useful”.
It would not be the first time that something like it has appeared. For almost as long as the “similar” button has existed (since 2009), the masses aspire to a “don’t like” button. Meta played with the test of a functionality like this, but ultimately never did.
In 2016, Facebook added the additional “reaction” emojis (smiling, laughing, hugging, loving). Geoff Teehan, director of product design at Facebook at the time, wrote an average article in 2016: “About a year ago, Mark (Zuckerberg) brought together a team of people to start thinking seriously about how to make the similar button more expressive.”
Teehan explained why they opted for additional reactions instead of an emoji “inches lowered”:
We should first consider the number of different reactions that we should include. This may seem a fairly simple task: simply slap the thumbs next to the similar button and ship it. It’s not that simple. People need a much higher degree of sophistication and wealth in the choices we provide to their communications. The binary “like” and “does not like” does not correctly reflect the way we react to the wide range of things we encounter in our real life.
In 2017, Facebook also tested a “Down” goals “button to Messenger. This would have been similar to the Apple Imessage reactions that were launched in the fall of 2016 and included an emoji at the bottom of the inch.
Instagram also considered something like that. In February of this year, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri published a Downvot Instagram comments test:
But will people understand what the arrow of the Downvote vote really means? Will they use it on comments that are foreign and in fact not “useful”, or will they use it to try to crush the comments with which they do not agree or do not like?
I questioned Meta on this subject, and a spokesperson told me that, unlike the past tests of an aversion or thumb button, this test will explicitly say to users that it is a question of being useful-a small bubble of text under the button will say: “let us know which comments are not useful.”
The test is still just a test. It might not end up being deployed. Personally, I think that less useful comments are less a burning problem than some of the other AI-Slop stuff on Facebook. (Facebook works to fight against part of that too.) But hey, it’s just my dubious comment.
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