Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and CEO, has confirmed that the social network is currently working on implementing a ‘Dislike’ button, a feature that some people have been waiting for years.

Currently promoted as a means of expressing emotions, the ‘Dislike’ button will probably end up as a tool for advertising, as the social network will get to learn about the things that make you sad or upset you. Facebook’s CEO claims that the new feature will be tested soon enough, with a mass launch to follow not long after.

“People have asked about the ‘dislike’ button for many years, and probably hundreds of people have asked about this, and today is a special day because today is the day that I actually get to say we are working on it, and are very close to shipping a test of it,” stated Zuckerberg.

To emphasize that the button would actually be used for empathy, rather than literally disliking something posted by a friend, Zuckerberg added that “we don’t want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people’s posts. […] That doesn’t seem like the kind of community that we want to create: You don’t want to go through the process of sharing some moment that was important to you in your day and have someone ‘downvote’ it. […] If you are sharing something that is sad…then it may not feel comfortable to ‘like’ that post.”

As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I would use the ‘Dislike’ button, to downvote posts that I don’t enjoy.

The Guardian has taken things a bit further and came up with 12 buttons that Facebook could really use, instead of the all-too general ‘Dislike.’ I have to admit that I find these far more useful.

Zuckerberg has also talked about Oculus, hinting at the possibility of experiencing zero gravity environments in VR. As for AI as a potential threat to humanity, Zuckerberg stated that “I think that it’s a little dangerous to be too negative about the prospect of something long term when all signs point to that over the next 10, 20, 30 years—whatever it is—we’re going to unlock all this value and help people’s lives so much by developing this technology. So I’m an optimist.”

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Via: CNBC