On Saturday, TechCrunch’s Josh Constine broke the news that Facebook was trialling new reaction emojis within Facebook Messenger.
The feature is distinctly reminiscent of Slack’s reactions. If you’re one of the handful of users having been granted access to the service, you can now reply to messages using one of seven reaction emojis. These are clustered to the left of the message, unlike Slack, where they hang underneath.
It’s early days, so the palette of emoji is pretty limited, but there’s the usual suspects. The hearts-in-eyes emoji. Faces that are crying, laughing, and frowning. There’s also thumbs-up and thumbs-down emoji, with the latter being described as the longed-for ‘dislike button.’
I admit, I haven’t tried this yet. Only a handful of people have. But I’m also oddly excited about it, because Facebook just gave us a way to quickly respond to messages without actually have to type anything. It’s going to do for instant messaging what TL;DR did for email.
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According to Constine, Facebook has envisioned the thumbs-down button as more of a ‘no’, rather than a dislike, but accepts that it’ll inevitably used to show disapproval for something.
Free to grab Starbucks at 12? Leave a thumbs-up. Got other plans? Leave a thumbs down. Struggling to find a parking space? Dislike that shit with a thumbs-down.
In short, these emojis will allow you to quickly and definitively reply to things, without leaving short messages that can seem terse, and thus rude. And you can do it without being dragged into a broader conversation.
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