Facebook Finally Adds Dislike Feature, But Only On Messenger

Facebook wasn’t the first to come up with the Like button, but it certainly popularized it. Since its inception, however, the absence of the Dislike option has been noted. The social media site finally decided to allow users the choice to use one, but only in a limited capacity. Specifically, the Dislike feature, along with a few other Reactions are being added to Messenger.

For those who haven’t really kept up with the way the new generation deals with exchanging messages, current trends often devolve to shortening entire sentences into a block of words made up of only first letters. NSFW, LOL, GOTH, SMH, these are just some of the more well-known versions. More extreme messaging enthusiasts, however, resort to only using emojis.

This is where Reactions and the Dislike feature comes in, Tech Crunch reports. When the publication reached out to Facebook, the social network confirmed that a test phase was indeed in the works involving integrating Reactions to Messenger.

“We’re always testing ways to make Messenger more fun and engaging,” Facebook told Tech Crunch. “This is a small test where we enable people to share an emoji that best represents their feelings on a message.”

Reactions is a feature introduced by Facebook a little over a year ago, which significantly expanded the kind of response a particular post, picture, or video got from other users. By applying it to Messenger, chat users can also start shortening their messages that can provide adequate context. People have been using the Like reaction to imply positivity, so it’s only to be expected that a Dislike reaction would say the opposite.

This is an option that users have been asking Facebook to add for years, The Verge reports, but the social media site had always denied such a request. It’s not really clear why, but the negative association with the thumbs down image might be part of it.