Sarah Dobbs looks into Facebook’s new ‘Reactions’
It’s hard to remember what online communication was like before the ‘Like’ button. Added to Facebook statuses back in 2009, that little thumbs-up icon has become a handy crutch for online interactions. While it’s obviously meant to convey approval – you’re meant to click it when you actually like something your friend has posted, whether that’s a flattering new selfie or a link to an article they think everyone should read – in practice, it’s grown to encompass more degrees of meaning than that.
As any regular user of Facebook knows, the simple Like can be invoked to mean ‘congratulations’, ‘that’s funny’, ‘I sympathise with you’ and a whole lot more. Most of the time, though, it probably just means ‘I thought I should acknowledge that you posted this, but I didn’t actually have anything to say in response.’
Gathering ‘Likes’ on Facebook has become a kind of obsession both for individuals and for businesses, for whom it’s important to prove that their Facebook fans are actually engaging with what they’re posting. However, as Facebook has become ever more central to the way most of us communicate online, the Like button, even with its various shades of meaning, has started to seem a bit inadequate. After all, you couldn’t hit Like if someone posted that they’d lost their job, or were ill, or had otherwise had something horrible happen to them.
Over the years, there’ve been various campaigns and groups formed to ask Facebook to add a ‘Dislike’ button alongside the Like button, but it seemed like their demands had fallen on deaf ears. Until now.
Introducing Reactions
The five new Reaction icons added on February 24th actually amount to one of the biggest changes to Facebook since it was originally launched all the way back in 2007. It means that now, when you hover over the Like button (or long press it, if you’re on a mobile device), a new menu pops up allowing you to choose to express your feelings in a variety of ways. You can ‘Love’ something, laugh at it by choosing the ‘Haha’ icon, express shock with the ‘Wow’ face, offer your sympathy with the ‘Sad’ icon, or get outraged with the ‘Angry’ face.
So now, if a friend posts that their grandmother has died, you can hit the Sad button, which seems much more appropriate than hitting Like would’ve been. The Like option still exists, but now it’s not the only quick option for responding to a post.
At the moment, Reactions are limited to posts. You can’t Haha at a comment someone’s left on someone else’s status, though you can still Like it. Even so, if you scroll through your Facebook Newsfeed today, you’ll see the different Reactions starting to be used as people figure out where the various options are, and start building them into their online interaction repertoire.
Meticulously Planned
This might seem like a frivolous thing to be writing an article about. After all, it’s just some new emoji type things, right? And since Facebook has had ‘Stickers’, its version of emojis, for a while now, this might not seem like a particularly big change.
Facebook took it very seriously, though. These new Reactions are the result of months and months of planning and testing. In early 2015, a meeting of Facebook’s execs revealed that they felt that something needed to be done about the Like button, but exactly what wasn’t obvious. Adding a Dislike button would just open the platform to abuse, while adding too many new options might just confuse users – especially older Facebookers, or international users.
Another significant behind-the-scenes factor to consider what the any change to the Like button could also potentially unbalance Facebook’s infamously secretive algorithms. These are important because they decide what content gets displayed in billions of users’ newsfeeds every day. Reactions might seem trivial, but they represent a pretty big overhaul of Facebook’s entire ecosystem.
Indeed, the development process took about a year from that first meeting, and involved bringing in social psychologists to help distil the complex varieties of human emotions into a manageable number of clickable options. Looking at Stickers helped – the team analysed the most-used Stickers, figuring that those were the sentiments people would want to express most often. Then came testing. And more testing. And more testing.
Eventually, after trying and discarding a few options – like a ‘Yay!’ icon that turned out to be less useful than expected – Facebook settled on its final six, a set of icons designed to be universally understood that seemed to cover pretty much any reaction anyone would ever need to express to their Facebook friends.
Can’t We Just Use Words?
You’d think the easiest thing to do, when the Like button isn’t appropriate, would be to just leave a comment. Words, after all, allow for much more nuance than even the most specific emoji. But, well, this is the internet. Over the last decade, we seem to have been weaning ourselves off words: blame Twitter, maybe, for training us to condense our thoughts into short, pithy, 140-character messages, or Tumblr, for encouraging the use of carefully selected reaction GIFs.
Really, though, the thing that’s most likely to have pushed users away from typing long comments and towards just wanting to interact through buttons is the rise of smartphones. Rather than sitting at our computers scrolling through Facebook, we’re more likely to be using the Facebook app, or accessing the site through a mobile browser. Stats from the end of last year showed that 1.44 billion people were accessing Facebook from a mobile and that a whopping 90% of active users used mobile devices to get their Facebook fix. While smartphones are great in many ways, they’re not amazing for typing large volumes of text, which is why emoji have become so popular.
This should be a smart move for Facebook, then. With more easy-to-use options for interacting, users will probably be communicating with one another – and, inevitably, with brands – more often than ever before. Time will tell, of course, whether we’ll be willing to swap out the familiar old Like for something more nuanced, and it’ll also be interesting to see how these new Reactions affect the kind of content Facebook decides we should or shouldn’t see when we visit the site – typically, Facebook hasn’t revealed how it’ll be interpreting the Reactions, or whether, for example, something that generates a lot of Angry clicks will be treated the same as something that got a lot of Likes or Loves – but for now, well, get reacting.