[camillomiller]

People wanted a dislike button, got a series of redundant emoticons with very little space for actual disagreement. Which is actually good, because it won't transform Facebook into a mess of flames and negativity. Wait, maybe it's already too late for that...

[austenallred]

Facebook doesn't want to encourage contention and negative emotions? Seems logical to me.

You remember how you feel when you use a product. When I comment on HN I feel like I'm standing before a military tribunal that is trying to pick apart everything I say and find a way to disagree with it. When I use Facebook I feel nothing but love and appreciation from the people I know and care about.

You may think that's lame or that you're above that, but I deal with enough shit in the rest of my life that I don't mind having a cushy place online to communicate with the people who care about me. And I'll even put up with Buzzfeed and email-forward-worthy garbage to do so.

On a macro scale I think that's something the world needs badly. I think most people could do with a little more love and positivity in their lives.

[plaguuuuuu]

>trying to pick apart everything I say and find a way to disagree with it.

We're totally not.

[Mz]

Ironically, you are so proving his point for him.

[monkey_slap]

That's the joke.

[Mz]

I was aware it was potentially a joke. HN is mostly not very welcoming of jokes and that sort of joke, where the point is to irritate someone expressing their frustration, is a type that I think is mostly not nice and generally does not work well on a large forum. It can be an okay thing in a small group of trusted friends. Even in small groups, the odds are high that it amounts to just assholery and disrespect. It gets worse the larger the group.

So, I think it still merely proves the point being made above it, regardless of its supposed intent to be funny at someone's expense.

[amyjess]

Well, the purpose of Reactions isn't to "provide a dislike button" like a lot of people wanted.

The purpose of reactions is to provide an alternative for people who don't want to click "Like" on stories of tragedy (e.g. someone's loved one dying, someone announcing they have cancer, or even something non-personal like a news article about a mass shooting) because it sounds inappropriate, like "ha ha, I'm enjoying your tragedy!". There are two reasons why this is important:

1. Some people want to exhibit support but don't know what to say, so they're not comfortable commenting. On more positive stories, they'll just hit "Like", but that would feel inappropriate to do on a more negative story, so they don't do anything even though they want to express their support.

2. Facebook's News Feed algorithm uses Likes to determine how articles are sorted in your News Feed. If people don't Like important stories because they feel the word "Like" is inappropriate, then those stories will be downranked because the algorithm doesn't know the stories are supposed to be important.

Reactions solve both by allowing people to both wordlessly express sympathy for and signal-boost stories that they feel would be inappropriate to "Like".

[Swizec]

> "ha ha, I'm enjoying your tragedy!"

That's not the semantics of the Like button however. The Like button's semantics, as used by most people, are "I have read your post, don't have anything meaningful to add, and agree with you and/or express my post-appropriate social action but do not feel affected enough or close enough to you on the social graph to leave a comment."

The meaning of a Like is extremely contextual. And most people know this.

Granted, a lot of newbie users get confused.

[shitloadofbooks]

But the word "like" has connotations and it looks _awful_ to have a post with someone pouring their heart out about a tragedy and then have "Janine and 99 others like this" directly below it.

[agumonkey]

Does having only positive emotions to virtually express causes a global mood raising or quite the opposite ? with HN local samples it seems neither, only sarcasm.