[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.