How Facebook’s Reactions Kinda Miss the Point
By: Dan Bayn
Tags: User Experience, Design, Social Media

A Contrarian Analysis and Exasperated Rant

What problem were we solving, again?

Facebook recently rolled out the first elaboration to their core social interaction in years, possibly ever: Reactions. Instead of just Liking something, you can now slap one of several emoji on it. And also there’s a heart, like Captain Planet.

o_O

Facebook’s own press claims that this new feature was meant to solve a simple problem: no one wants to “like” a post that’s about something bad. Facebook users needed a way to commiserate.

The misguided asked for a “dislike” button. The problems with that idea are belligerent and numerous (I wrote about them in 2014), but the most salient point is that any negative sentiment can and will be used by bad faith actors to crap in other people’s ice cream.

Instead, Facebook has chosen to increase the emotional range of the Like button. If someone posts about their car accident, you can respond with a Cryface reaction. When someone posts about being harassed by some jackhole on the street, you can respond with a, uh… this last guy on the right. Tantrumface. Hothead.

You get the idea.

There are some problems with this approach. First, four of the six new Reactions (Happy, Dopey, Sneezy, and Heart) have nothing to do with commiseration. Can you still claim success when 2/3 of your solution has nothing to do with the problem? Not convincingly.

Second, Sad and Angry still aren’t that great for commiseration. Simply identifying the emotion that someone is feeling isn’t the same as providing comfort or support. It’s just proving you can identify HU-mon feelings.

Which is probably the real point of all this. Judging solely by the solution they came up with, I’d say the design team’s actual goal was to get free sentiment analysis from Facebook users. I think Big Z wants to know the emotional content of your posts and he wants you to make it happen.

Reactions aren’t a way to communicate your emotions to other Facebook users. They’re a way for Facebook to tag content with an emotion.

Even if people do use the new Reactions to communicate their own feelings, we’re still left with a third problem: Sarcasm. Depending on their context, all of these damn emoji can be turned into even more hurtful “dislike” buttons. Now I can…

Laugh at your pain.

Smile at your misfortune.

Wow when I want to roll my eyes.

Cryface your vacation photos.

Scowl at your political opinions.

That’s way more fun than “liking” your parking ticket ever could have been.

And Love is just gonna become the new Like. Mark my words.

“Oh, you just ‘Liked’ that Futurama gif, huh?

“Yeah, it was good.”

“But you didn’t ‘Love’ it.

“Well…”

“I’ll just try harder to please you, next time. Whatever.”

If you ask me, a better solution to the actual problem would have been a single new endorsement: Hug. It shows sympathy and support. It’s difficult to use sarcastically. It’s even international, fer crying out loud! Maybe it doesn’t lend itself to an icon, but I remain optimistic.

\(o_o)/

So, what do you think? Did Facebook fail to solve their commiseration problem or did they set out to solve a different problem all together? Or is Wowface the best thing since sliced bread?