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It will be very interesting to see their implementation of the 'dislike' button, and the nuances they will have to build into the system to avoid (namely) hate-spamming, etc — the reason for the feature's lack of existence thus far.
As explained in the article, this is not an additional option, it's just going to be an alternative label for a button that does the same thing as "Like" for negative/sad stories ("my cat died", etc).
I wonder how they will differentiate between: 1. People expressing sympathy with a bad event (should show up in news feed. 2. People not liking what they need (should not show up in news feed).

Interesting UX challenge.

Here's a way to combat it: let the posting user select whether the post is likeable, or dislikeable. (But not both)

Eg, the status "my dog is awesome" is likeable-only (the default), and "my dog died" could be set to dislikeable-only.

That makes sense to me.
Doesn't this kinda defeat the purpose of a dislike button though?

I'm only gonna click like if I think the dog is awesome also. And if I didn't care, I wouldn't. And if I don't think the dog is awesome, I'm gonna ignore it.

Same for if the dog died. Sure, most of the time it sucks and a dislike would be appropriate, but if the dog was bad with kids, maybe it had it coming.

In your scenario, your not adding another metric - your just changing the meaning of the action, in which case no additional information is being gained, your just changing what that action is called to appease peoples feelings.

Facebook was never been talking about a traditional downvote button. From the article:

> However he went on to say he did not want it to be a mechanism with which people could "down vote" others' posts.

> Instead, it will be for times when clicking "like" on "sad" posts felt insensitive.

"+1" seems like a neutral enough option that endorses the sentiment of the post, without ascribing an emotion to it.

Except Google+ is already using it.

The +1 is probably the best option there is, you can +1 something even if you completely disagree with that is stated or think it's completely horseshit but you think that It's important enough for other people to see.

The whole like/dislike or up/down is really a big issue on many cases since people misuse that (not counting intentional abuse) and think that it's a way to show support or disagreement with an opinion.

Reddit has it bad, HN probably has it even worse since only a few downvotes will actually silence a comment, and too many times you see comments that do not violate any rules on HN and are actually quite well written that get downvoted because the opinion that is expressed in them might not be popular enough or PC enough, heck even if something is factually wrong it's sad too see the comment being buried especially when there are replies provide fix the factuality of that original comment.

I would not mind to see HN move to a +1 system and just leave the flag option for comments that violates the site's rules.

It shouldn't be a "dislike" button if it is only meant for sad posts. If anything, it should be an "sympathize" button.
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I definitely like that wording better. It probably fits well with their "positivity" reasoning for not having a dislike button in the past, to boot.
I would assume this is something that the poster will have to set? Because if not it would be quite funny to see "sympathy" floods on posts like "I'm getting married" or "I just had a baby".

Would actually be nice if Facebook had the ability to show support or disagreement with a content of a post, as well as some sort of "not interested" button.

Click-bait title, and a clear case of media copying media while not verifying.

Zuckerberg does not explicitly talk about a "Dislike"-button but about an button to express sympathy. see https://vimeo.com/139401042