Facebook has started rolling out a dislike button in messages, according to a report. However, the company hasn’t gone mainstream with the dislike button and has kept it restricted to user’s reactions just to messages.
“We’re always testing ways to make Messenger more fun and engaging. This is a small test where we enable people to share an emoji that best represents their feelings on a message.” Facebook told TechCrunch about the new feature on Saturday.
TechCrunch reported that a user named Hoan Do had seen Messenger showing users a Reactions option. How it works is that if the user hovers over messages which friends have sent in a chat thread, he/she will be able to access it by tapping the emoji button.
Once the user taps on the button, an emoji tray will pop up showing the thumbs up like, thumbs down dislike, heart-eyes, LOL, wow, sad and angry emojis. Once the user chooses a reaction, everyone on the thread will see it and any user on the same thread can tap the top of the messages to see who has given what reaction to messages on the thread.
As the company has already specified, the feature is in testing stage currently and all users did not have access to it at the time of writing. The expectation is that feature will eventually be rolled out across the social network, especially on status messages and comments, the staples of interaction on Facebook.
TechCrunch calls the dislike button the “much requested and always denied” button. The report further says that the company has avoided rolling out the feature until now, since it did not want to inject too much negativity into the news feed.
The company told the publication on Saturday that it sees the button as more of a “no” button and it is seeing if the dislike button could be helpful for logistics and voting.
The change in Facebook’s emoji lineup comes after Apple’s iMessage recently offered Tapback emojis, which lets people respond with similar emojis.
Reactions was launched in October 2015 and according to the report, more than 300 billion reactions have been used so far with the heart emoji reaction representing love being the most popular one, and Mexico, Chile and Suriname reacting the most.
The move could help Facebook level up with rivals such as Snapchat and Line which already offer such features.