A dislike button is too complex for Facebook

It seems that ever since the launch of the ‘Like’ button on Facebook people have been pestering the social media giant to introduce the opposite, a ‘Dislike’ button to express their disapproval. I wouldn’t hold your breath for one, apparently it’s to complex to introduce.

Speaking to TechRadar Bret Taylor, ex-Facebook CTO and creator of the ‘Like’ button, said that there probably never will be one, claiming:

“[The dislike button] came up a lot. In fact even the language of the word like was something we discussed a lot as well. But regarding the dislike button, the main reason is that in the context of the social network, the negativity of that button has a lot of unfortunate consequences. The reason we launched the button in the first place was that there were a lot of times that people wanted to acknowledge something someone did, but didn’t have anything to say. And a lot of comments were one word like ‘cool’ or ‘wow’ so the like button let people did that with a single click. It wasn’t really just a sentiment of ‘like’.”

Taylor apparently feels that if you want to express your disapproval of a topic you should say so in a comment in order to make yourself clear. It makes sense that there could be some unforeseen consequences for ‘disliking’ something, especially if it’s not clear what you’re actually disliking in the first place. It could be the comment as a whole, it could be the topic of the comment, or it could just be that you’re a bastard.

It’s worth nothing that Taylor no longer works for Facebook, so it would be unwise to say it’ll never happen. That being said it seems to be that the company has a very clear idea that the dislike button isn’t going to work, even if the upvote/downvote system works everywhere else on the internet.