Oh, if I had a penny for every time I read a comment saying “dislike” on Facebook and, maybe, half a penny for every time I heard someone say they would love a “dislike” button. “Where’s the dislike button?” desperately inquires he who comments day and night, unhappy with the fact he can’t really show the disapproval his newsfeed generates in him, without a thumb-down that he could quickly and efficiently click on.
Apparently, Facebook’s God, Mark Zuckerberg, is slowly coming around the idea of making millions of users incredibly happy, by providing them with something similar to a “dislike” button. Imagine being able to show your discontent whenever you truly and simply don’t have the words, or the time, to express how much you hate that video you have just seen. After all, a dislike button really worked on youtube and gave us an idea of how loathed something as simple as a video can actually be (just in case the thousands of trolling comments didn’t give us a hint). He talked about it all during a Q&A event that took place in Menlo Park, California, last Thursday.
Mark Zuckerberg points out that people often find themselves emotionally moved by a post but can’t show it by liking the post, because of the sad content of the post itself. He’s, however, worried that a dislike button could quickly create a vortex of hate that would diminish the value of virtually everything and anything that is posted on the social network.
Worrying about such a thing, though, becomes slightly incoherent when we consider that a ton of stuff that is advertised on Facebook and that fills up our newsfeed on a daily basis, is made popular by nothing more than a fat number of “fake likes.”
Have you ever wondered why, even if the last website you visited is “Forever 21,” (and you’re clearly conscious of the fact that the websites you visit are reflected in the kind of advertisement shown to you) you are bombed with pictures of Asian women wearing cheap coats that couldn’t fit around your leg even if you tried really hard? Well, apparently there are people who get paid to put thousands of likes on posts, sometimes these people act as individuals, sometimes they’re part of companies, sometimes they aren’t even real people. Did you actually think 10 billion people appreciated “50 Shades of Grey”? Possibly, but I have hope that a robot might have inflated the number of likes the book received, on Facebook. Robots without a good taste in literature, I might add.
So, while Zuckerberg promises that catching those “fake likers” is his first priority, others are already way too excited about the birth of a series of buttons that could communicate something other than appreciation but wouldn’t transform the already filled-with-hate social network in a place populated by nothing but thumbs-down.
Cheer up, you who post dozens of pictures of your Boo Boo (may your boo boo be a baby, a dog, a cat or your boyfriend), nobody can tell you how utterly fed up they are with the 150th image you captured and immediately posted today by unliking it. Rest assured, if you know the person in real life, they wouldn’t even dare to say “dislike,” so, post away and leave your worrying somewhere else, maybe on youtube…definitely on youtube.
Be prepared though, someone might soon find your 30.000th selfie “unappealing” or “irritating.” Could there ever be such buttons? What do you think, would a “dislike” button make things even worse? Would you use it?