Facebook has experimented with a more nuanced approach to responding to friends' posts, though it has not shown up on the world's largest social network yet. The "sympathize" button appeared at one of Facebook's hackathons, as a way to express Facebook's popular one-click support, without seeming callous.
It's a problem Facebook users come to whenever a friend has a bad day, breaks up with a significant other, experiences a death in the family, or otherwise posts gloomy news on their Facebook profile. What do you do? "Like" their relative's death notice? You basically have to leave a message of sympathy, because otherwise you'll seem like a jerk for "Liking" their woebegone status.
Facebook's engineers have apparently wrestled with the problem, and one came up with a "Sympathize" button at one of Facebook's previously held hackathons - a kind of brainstorming session for programmers. This is according to Dan Muriello, a Facebook engineer who spoke about the compassionate experiment on Thursday, which was first reported by the Huffington Post.
According to Muriello, who spoke during Facebook's "Compassion Research Day" which was livestreamed here, the "sympathize" button would become enabled - replacing the "like" button - if a Facebook user selected a negative emotion from the network's list of feelings. "It would be, 'five people sympathize with this,' instead of 'five people 'like' this,'" according to Muriello. "Which of course a lot of people were, and still are, very excited about." But while the idea was admired (dare I say, "liked") by many Facebook engineers, Muriello said that the "sympathize" button is not going to show up in the next Facebook update, saying, "we made a decision that it was not exactly the right time to launch that product - yet."
The "sympathize" button may not ever show up as a general option on Facebook - but it could. Hackathons for the company have resulted in a lot of innovations that have become part of the every day user experience of the site. Hackathons are "the foundation for great innovation and thinking about how we can better serve people around the world," said a spokesperson for Facebook, according to the Huffington Post. "Some of our best ideas come from hackathons, and many ideas that don't get pursued often help us think differently about how we can improve our service."
Some ideas that have come from hackathons include the now-commonly used Facebook Chat, the friend suggestion engine, and the Facebook Timline - all now integral parts of the Facebook experience.
Of course, there are Facebook observers (and/or misanthropes) who have had a few of their own suggestions for the popular social network. The "dislike" button has long been joked about as a perfect feature to add, especially as a way to quickly respond to some of the more insipid posts by Facebook over-sharers. And more recently, a (fake) Louis C.K. Twitter account posted this gem of a button suggestion, which expresses a common feeling for all social network navigators, called the "So What?" button:
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