If there’s one feature Facebook users have been clamoring for, it’s for the company to return their privacy. A close second, however, is a Dislike button, and Mark Zuckerberg admits the company has been exploring that option. Truthfully, it’ll never happen. But you may get something similar to it.
Why will you never get a Dislike button? Trolls. Any site that has something like a dislike button has to deal with coordinated revenge campaigns, personal vendettas, and a whole host of other B.S. that honestly costs a lot of money to deal with. It’s already something the site has struggled to get a line on, as users flag each other’s profiles and fan pages as inappropriate out of spite.
More to the point, it’s against the site’s weird Stepford Wives-esque agenda to keep everything relentlessly positive and make Facebook as squishy and non-threatening as possible. This is a company that’s seriously considering automatically ruining jokes just because some of its users are complete idiots.
By the same token, though, users have a point in that you may want to show support for serious political causes or a friend struggling through tough times, but clicking “Like” on a status is somewhat limited. Who wants to tell somebody that they “like” that their grandpa got hit by a truck?
So what will Facebook do? My guess is they’ll create a new button that’s not a Like, but is a positive sentiment. It’ll be something along the lines of a “Hug” or an “Agree” button, giving users the ability to express sympathy or concordance without saying they “like” something. As for the Dislike button, it’ll never happen. But we can dream.