Culture

Facebook’s Given You Some Weird Round Faces To Express Your Feelings Instead Of A Dislike Button

THIS IS NOT WHAT WE ASKED FOR, ZUCKERBERG.

by Alex McKinnon  25 February 2016

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Update, February 25: Facebook has rolled out Reaction buttons as of today. Here’s one we prepared earlier.

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Back in September Facebook founder and brutal master of us all Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was working on the fabled Dislike button, finally giving you the freedom to unleash your true passive-aggressive social media potential on friends who post about smoothies that can cure cancer and photos of their weird-looking kid.

But a few weeks later, Facebook’s Facebook page (heh) uploaded a video unveiling what the new feature’s going to look like, and: surprise! It’s not a Dislike button at all. Rather, Facebook’s introducing Reactions, which are basically moving emoji like ‘Yay’, ‘Wow’, ‘Sad’ and ‘Angry’ that you can select in place of Liking something. It’s basically the same thing Buzzfeed do on their articles with ‘LOL’, ‘OMG’ and ‘</3’, only flooding your Facebook feed forever thanks to thousands on thousands of emoji-happy aunties.

Reactions were rolled out across the network today, which is why a million cartoony faces are burning their way into your retinas as we speak. People seem slightly confused and aggrieved at the change, as people are every time Facebook changes anything ever. Eventually, though, we’ll come to accept this, just as we’ve learned to accept the wholesale surrender of our personal information to corporations in exchange for the privilege of seeing how the insufferable people you went to high school are ruining their lives now.