Facebook is finally making a dislike button

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The dislike button is coming.
The dislike button is coming.
Photo: Facebook

Get ready to give your friend’s barrage of baby pics a big thumbs down on Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg announced today in a townhall meeting that the social network is finally planning to bring a ‘dislike’ button Facebook.

Facebook users have been clamoring for a dislike or down vote button since the birth of the like button, and Zuckerberg says the company is nearly ready to give us one.

“People have asked about the ‘dislike’ button for many years, and probably hundreds of people have asked about this, and today is a special day because today is the day that I actually get to say we are working on it, and are very close to shipping a test of it,” Zuckerberg said.

The new thumbs down button won’t be the same as down voting on Reddit, but the Facebook CEO revealed that the new button will allow people to express empathy with their Facebook friends on posts where they may not feel comfortable clicking ‘like’.

“That doesn’t seem like the kind of community that we want to create,” Zuckerberg said, referring to Reddit. “You don’t want to go through the process of sharing some moment that was important to you in your day and have someone ‘downvote’ it.”

Zuckerberg explained that creating the dislike interaction has been “surprisingly complicated” for its engineers. No word yet on when the dislike button will roll out to the public, but Facebook thinks it’s almost ready to start testing it before a wider roll out.

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