Hating on your friends' dumb Facebook posts is on the verge of getting a whole lot easier.
Ever the innovator, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to have found a way to transfer all the bickering in your feed into something much more orderly. Specifically, downvotes.
On Thursday, various people took to Twitter to voice their surprise at a new feature they say they spotted on the sprawling social media platform. If their reports are accurate, it appears to allow you to downvote comments you don't like.
This has long been a feature on sites like Reddit, but Zuckerberg has long been adamant about refusing to add a "dislike" button to his service.
And yet, according to a thread on Reddit spotted by The Daily Beast reporter Taylor Lorenz, a version of that button has made its way into some users accounts.
Seeing a downvote option on Facebook now - not on news articles, but on comments on a post of mine. Is it universal now or are they testing it with an audience subset?
— Holly Epstein Ojalvo (@heoj) February 8, 2018
Hey @FrankCatalano I have it as of this morning as well! I see it mentioned nowhere except this one Tweet ?
— Christina Hudler (@hudlersocial) February 8, 2018
We've reached out to Facebook for more details, and will update this when we hear back. Meanwhile, the co-founder of Reddit — which employs upvoting and downvoting — chimed in.
It's important to remember that Facebook often tests out new products on subsets of its users, and doesn't always make them available to everyone.
Still, if Facebook is testing this, it shows that Zuckerberg is willing to try a little structured negativity on his site. After all, Facebook already has plenty of the unstructured variety.