How do you "like" this? On Wednesday, February 24, Facebook finally introduced five new ways for users to respond to friends’ timeline posts. Rather than simply “liking” a status or photo, you can now more accurately express your feelings with the following five Reaction buttons: Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry.
While the Like button is here to stay, hovering over it will open a little popup to show your new alternatives. Subsequently, rather than tallying “likes” on a post, Facebook will now calculate the reaction count and display the icons of the buttons most pressed.
And if you’re still curious about which of your friends might be Sad, Angry, in Love, Wowed or even Haha-ing because of what you uploaded, you’re able to see the breakdown of who felt what.
According to Facebook News Feed engineering manager Tom Alison, these recently added buttons were created after the site’s founder Mark Zuckerberg told his team: “I want to really make it easy for people to give other types of feedback than the Like button in News Feed.”
With the advent of Reactions comes Facebook’s updated method of filtering your News Feed, too.
“If someone uses a Reaction, we will infer they want to see more of that type of post. In the beginning, it won’t matter if someone likes, ‘wows’ or ‘sads’ a post,” Facebook writes in their Newsroom. “Over time we hope to learn how the different Reactions should be weighted differently by News Feed to do a better job of showing everyone the stories they most want to see.”
Tell Us: Do you like Facebook’s new Reaction buttons?
