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Justin Rosenstein: No Dislike Button on Facebook

Name: Justin Rosenstein: No Dislike Button on Facebook
Uploaded: 2013-05-13T23:02:09+00:00
Duration: 1 min 27 s
Channel: GHION.AI
Description: In this interview excerpt, Justin Rosenstein recounts his progression at Facebook from product management to engineering leadership, highlighting his…

13 May 2013 · 1 min

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1:27

In this interview excerpt, Justin Rosenstein recounts his progression at Facebook from product management to engineering leadership, highlighting his work on Facebook Pages that enabled non-human entities to join the social graph. He describes how a hackathon project sparked the development of the Like button, driven by the observation that users sought low‑effort ways to express affirmation. Rosenstein explains the design goal of making positive interaction as simple as a single click, and argues that the absence of a Dislike button reflects a deliberate, opinionated choice to shape the social graph toward mutual support rather than negativity. He notes that despite frequent requests for a Dislike button, the platform’s infrastructure is intended to encourage affirmation and help users help each other.

Chapters

After that I went to Facebook where I went from product management to engineering management and tech leading. Did a bunch of things that were really exciting to me including Facebook Pages, which was a really cool way to allow non-human entities to also participate in the social graph. And then my hackathon project was the like button, which I helped lead the development of as well, and that came out of this— observation that people were using things like wall posts and comments to express affirmation and positivity. And it dawned on me, I was like, what if we could make it easier? What if we could make it so that the effort required was so low and eventually realized the lowest effort possible would be one click. What if we could make it super easy for people to share that kind of positivity with each other? And that led to the design of the like button. To this day, the number one most requested feature that Facebook gets is the dislike button, which is funny to me because it really misses the point of the exercise. We're trying to encourage and actually design the infrastructure and the social graph in a way that is opinionated, in a way that prefers a world in which we help each other, help affirm each other rather than a world in which we tear each other down. So that's why there's a like and not a dislike button.