Social media platforms generally tend to avoid the Dislike button, with most focusing on comments and shares instead. Yet, it remains one of the most requested features amongst the user base, who want to have a tangible way of expressing their frustrations. While emoji reactions do deliver some of the same functionality, it is just not as impactful as seeing the ultimate symbol of your detractors highlighted in black.
This is especially useful in comment threads, which can rack up thousands of replies on each individual comment. By having a simple dislike feature present there, lets users understand what kind of discourse they might be stepping into. It will also hopefully curb the misuse of the report button, which frees up more resources for actual content moderation.
Only time will tell whether this move will actually have any benefit, considering how the dislike button was present on YouTube for more than a decade and yet still fell out of utility in the last year. For now, the company is simply focused on releasing it to its global user base without any bugs. We will revisit the conversation of potential benefits at a later time when people have had enough experience with it to form an honest opinion.
