By now everyone’s heard that Facebook is considering an additional feature that many are calling the ‘dislike’ button. This is something I’ve been in favour of for years because my views are the same as Facebook’s: there should be a way to express empathy/sympathy.¹

(Side note: Anyone else miss the days where you never found out about a new Facebook feature until one of your friends started using it? Now there’s huge press coverage about features that haven’t even happened yet).

Here are my predictions. They could be entirely wrong, but it’s still fun to (over)think this stuff.

1. There will be fewer public arguments

Most people seem to think it will cause more arguments. Personally, I think it will result in fewer public arguments. On its own, a ‘dislike’ is a single button click with no context or comment to reply to. It doesn’t provide a platform for debate or offer an opinion that can be argued against. At the moment, more people like or comment rather than like and comment, and although I think there will be a small shift in this behaviour towards perfroming two actions (like or dislike + comment), I think a lot of people will ‘dislike’ and then leave.

For groups and pages, this will kill a lot of conversation – although it will be interesting to see whether Facebook will consider a ‘dislike’ similar to a ‘like’ for algorithmic purposes and show the post to more people. If it does, expect to see more deliberately controversial posts by pages looking to extend their organic reach.

However, on personal profiles, presumably you’ll be able to see who ‘disliked’ your post, and can tag them in the comments (or contact them in another way) to call them out on it if they’re abusing it. That could result in more localised, personal arguments. However, I still think this will be fairly minimal.

This is good for personal relationships, but bad for the number of Facebook comments, if they care about that kind of thing.

2. It will help produce better content in the long term

If the button is rolled out to pages – and I can see plenty of benefits to only rolling it out to personal profiles, at least at first – it’s going to be abused by people who use it to signify unhappiness rather than sympathy/empathy. This will be a valuable data source for pages looking to create good content and frame posts in a way that their audience appreciates. More data is always good. At the moment, people who see posts but don’t interact with them are effectively neutral – page admins have no idea whether they’re not interested, distracted by something else, or actively dislike what they’re seeing. A dislike button could change that.

There will be edge cases where people angry about a service or at a company will express their displeasure on every post with a ‘dislike’, but presumably there will be some kind of spam filter to stop that happening in addition to regular user blocking.

3. It will all but kill off the question/poll feature

If you’re asking people in a group for their opinions on your kitchen makeover, or asking your customers if they like the idea of your new drink flavour, this will be much easier to cater for with twin ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ features. As people engage more with images, simple yes/no questions with an image will replace the somewhat ugly and clunky poll feature in a lot of cases. It’s likely that brands will try to get more user feedback from their audiences and do more market research this way.

4. Expect to see more closed question content

This will have more of a noticeable impact on brands, but I can imagine this happening more in groups to some degree as well. It will result in the more lazy content of ‘What did you think of Bob’s X Factor performance last night? Hit ‘like’ or ‘dislike”. And there will probably be far more competitions along these lines too.

Brands love this kind of thing because it’s really easy to set up, and simple closed questions gain more interaction. However, it’s going to get boring fast for end-users.

5. The ‘dislike’ option will be excluded from ads

(Or, alternatively, brands will be allowed to choose whether they include or exclude the ‘dislike’ feature, and ‘dislike’ won’t be a default. I think this may be a future consideration though). This is actually quite significant because it means that users will interact differently with adverts compared to regular posts. A ‘dislike’ button has minimal use for most non-media brands, although charities and similar causes would make good use of it for their emotive pleas.

Will boosted posts still have a dislike button? I would think so, although who knows. It might be removed by default, or you might have the option to remove it.

However this works out, what it shows is that the smallest, single-worded button feature on a website can actually have a tremendous impact on the human race’s communication and relationships. That’s terrifying. It really puts into perspective how much power and responsibility Facebook has in making the smallest change.

What impact to do you think a ‘dislike’ button will have? Leave a comment below.