Facebook Will Test "Yay," "Haha," "Sad" Buttons

Facebook’s rumored “dislike” button might end up being a little more nuanced than we thought. The social media titan is going to start testing a new system of emotional reactions to posts, rather than simply a “like” button. 

The options, in addition to the basic “like,” will be: “love,” “haha,” “yay,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry,” represented by emoji. The options are going to start appearing on the homepages of users in Ireland and Spain tomorrow.

Facebook has long been interested in studying the way that people communicate online, and finding ways for its users to express more nuanced emotions. In 2013, it debuted a set of emotion-conveying Stickers designed with the help of a psychology professor that included visual representations of feelings like “sympathetic” and “grateful.” More controversially, it also manipulated some 700,000 users’ feeds to test how viewing different content on the service can change people’s emotions. 

If the new reaction buttons prove popular during testing in Europe, presumably those features might make their way to the rest of the world in the future.

[h/t: Mashable]