Facebook has finally released its Reactions feature — after almost a year of testing them in various countries.
Available on the website and the app, Facebook users can now — in addition to Liking — add reactions like “Love”, “Haha”, “Wow”, “Sad” and “Angry” to a post that they come across on their Newsfeed.
According to Facebook’s announcement on their Newsroom page, users need to “hold down the Like button on mobile or hover over the Like button on desktop to see the reaction image options” and then choose the one they wish to “react” with.
However, the rollout hasn’t been as smooth as Facebook would have liked it to be. Hovering over the Like button will show you the new reactions, but spacing between the reactions make clicking on the right one pretty hard.
Just be careful you don’t accidentally “love” someone’s post mourning the tragic loss of a pet.
The decision to use “emojis” — or emoticons — to represent the emotions listed has also made it easier for people to express what exactly they feel.
Vyvyan Evans a professor of linguistics at Bangor University, told Wired.com about their importance in today’s pop culture — “The stratospheric rise of emoji is essentially fulfilling the function of nonverbal cues in spoken communication.”
The emojis are said to be based on Facebook’s own Stickers. Not everyone seems to be a fan of Facebook Reactions, however, with people claiming it would now make it harder to decide what emotion they want to react to a post with.
As Alissa Walker puts it, writing on Gizmodo.com, “If Mark Zuckerberg is truly honest about his intentions to get the whole world online as part of this fever dream to have the entire planet participate in this great shared experience, he just made that a s***-ton harder. We’re never going to agree on anything again.”
The Facebook “Like” button was originally designed in the colour green. It was launched in 2009 and the designers even considered using the heart icon or even stars, because Facebook felt the thumbs up icon could offend certain cultures.
The “Like” button was originally called the “Awesome” button until Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg vetoed the name. The feature was also said to be stolen from rival social network site Friendfeed.
