By inventing the Like button in 2009, Facebook put itself in a bind: how to create a less binary and more nuanced version without encouraging toxicity? Instagram is still asking itself this question, fifteen years later.
Nothing is ever completely finished, definitive, or finalized, but when it came time to take stock, this development process must have seemed endless. In putting the final point to the Medium publication that traces its history, Geoff Teehan must have, beyond feeling a sense of accomplishment, harbored a certain resentment towards Justin Rosenstein, the man behind the like button. This universal, addictive button, capable of triggering the dopamine hit that pushes you to publish again and again. And for which, sooner or later, a more nuanced, even negative, version would have to be created, as some users had long demanded.
A brilliant invention, but difficult to scale up
Like Justin Rosenstein, Geoff Teehan holds a special place in Facebook history, having been entrusted with this perilous task in 2015. When he first wrote for Medium, he was head of design at the Menlo Park firm and had just completed a long-secret project that had occupied his attention for over a year: designing a dislike button that bore neither the name nor the negative connotation. At the request of Mark Zuckerberg, he led a multidisciplinary team of researchers, engineers, designers, and content experts with one mission: to create a series of “reactions” capable of complementing the like and, above all, expressing a whole range of emotions while remaining universally understandable. “We knew from the start that this project would be difficult,” he admits.
Difficult, but probably inevitable. Internally, the limitations of the like button have been identified since its creation. Too binary, too reductive, but less engaging than a comment and therefore, paradoxically, massively used. “The like button allows you to do two things very simply: on the one hand, show someone that you have seen their content, and on the other hand, make yourself visible to others,” analyzed Larry Rosen, professor of psychology at the University of California, in the columns of WIRED magazine.
But what should you do when the content is “not likable,” to use Geoff Teehan’s words? Should you add a thumbs-up to the post, even when it legitimately doesn’t arouse approval or enthusiasm, but rather sadness, disgust, or anger? “At first glance, the mission seems simple: just add a thumbs-down next to the like, and move on. But the reality is more complex (…) A binary opposition between “like” and “dislike” is not enough to represent the diversity of reactions we have to content – as in real life,” explains the former head of design.
When you’re behind a screen and you have the opportunity to do something that might hurt someone, you’re more likely to do it.
Facebook and the impasse of the reverse like
The obstacle is undoubtedly there. Deploying a dislike button, especially in a frontal manner, carried risks: discouraging users from posting, since it is never very pleasant to be virtually disapproved of by those close to you, and encouraging toxic behavior. “I think that, as with everything that happens online, when you are behind a screen and you have the possibility of doing something that could hurt someone, you are more inclined to do it,” Larry Rosen summed up quite aptly to WIRED.
This vision is the opposite of the experience that Facebook was trying to promote in the mid-2010s before Mark Zuckerberg started lifting weights, changing his look, and visiting Joe Rogan’s. “While the idea of a dislike button appeals to many users, few of them, however, want their posts to suffer,” Tom Whitnah, a former Facebook engineer who helped develop the like button, added on the Quora platform. “By making the negative dimension of comments a form of interaction in its own right, Facebook would have taken the risk of normalizing—or even amplifying—negativity that most users do not want to see invading their online space.”
So, rather than implementing it, the platform got ahead of Pixar and Inside Out by developing five small icons, supposedly capturing the complexity of human emotions with pixels and emphasis. A pirouette that clearly did the job: launched in 2016 after several months of experimentation, the Reactions system—whose concept was, in fact, copiously borrowed from Path, explained The Verge —has become entrenched in usage, both to express outrage, irony, or support. But the time it took to design these five emojis speaks volumes about the difficulty of evolving the like button—and even more so of legitimizing a negative interaction on Meta platforms. A problem Instagram is facing today.
