Dislike Buttons

Ever since Facebook released the Like button in early 2009, Facebook users have begged and petitioned for a Dislike button. Several groups and pages with thousands, and sometimes millions, of members have been created, all in an attempt to persuade Facebook to add the button. Others, however, have taken it a step further by taking the Facebook programmers out of the picture by providing (or at least claiming to provide) a Dislike button of their own.

If you search ‘Dislike Button’ on Facebook, several huge groups and pages come up. About half of the first ten results are petitions to Facebook to add a Dislike button, but the rest are groups and pages claiming that the Dislike Button has already been created by other people and is ready to be added. In this article, we’ll look at the four biggest groups that came up in my search results. These groups demonstrate the three main themes in my argument against the existence of a fully-working Dislike Button.

Group Building

The two biggest groups that came up in the search, with about one million members each, fall into what I call the “Group Building” category. What I mean by “Group Building” is that these groups simply exist to become as large as they possibly can and don’t even attempt to do what they promise to those who join. How do you spot groups like these?

Groups that are there just to get big will ask you to join them, and will tell you that the Dislike Button they are promising you won’t work unless you join. Most will also require that you invite all of your friends, and will even provide you with some JavaScript to use on the invite page that will make selecting all your friends quick and easy. These groups may even require that you become a fan of a Page that is related to the group, and then go and suggest it to all your friends. Finally, most of these groups will not allow their members to post to the group’s Wall or to the Discussions. This way, no one can complain about the group not delivering on its promise of a Dislike Button on the group’s Wall or Discussions, which means that more people will join the group since they don’t see anyone complaining about it not working.

The two groups that I found that I’ve put in this category fit the above description perfectly. Neither of them allow their members to post, and they both require you to join the group and invite all of your friends. So far, we can determine when a group is clearly trying to get as big as possible, but why does this mean that they don’t work? So what if the group requires you to join and invite all your friends, if it works it works, right? Not quite. The problem here is that the creators of these groups claim that their Dislike button won’t work unless you join the group and invite your friends, but there is no possible way to activate something for someone once they join a group, and there is no way to tell if they have invited their friends. Therefore, any group that claims that just joining it and inviting your friends to it makes something work is clearly lying.

Applications

Since groups can’t activate a Dislike Button on their own, what about applications?

This theme was brought to my attention by the third of the four groups that came up in my search, which actually also demonstrates the “Group Building” theme. True to form, the group said that you had to join it and invite all your friends, but it added something new: joining the group and adding your friends would make a link to a Dislike Button application work correctly, which you could then click and add the application.

As mentioned above, you can’t activate ANYTHING automatically when someone joins your group, so that part of it is a lie. In addition, even if the link to the supposed application did work, there’s no way the application could actually work fully.

When you see that people have “liked” your status or a photo or something, the reason you can see that is because that information is stored on Facebook’s servers. When you load up a page on Facebook, the page makes a request to the server for all the information it needs to display the page properly, including which users “liked” certain things.

What this means is that for a fully working Dislike Button application to actually work, it would somehow need to get into Facebook’s servers and store the information in Facebook’s databases, and then retrieve that information on every page load. There’s a couple serious problems with this strategy: the first is that they need to know the password to gain access to Facebook’s databases to store the information necessary to record “dislikes”, and second, they somehow have to get Facebook pages to retrieve the information from the database when those pages are viewed. Both are problems because they require hacking, and even if they were capable of hacking into Facebook to get the Dislike Button to work, the application would be removed immediately.

Since hacking clearly isn’t an option, an alternative would be for the application to use its own servers, but what this would mean is that only people who actually have the application could see the dislikes. This is similar to what Thomas Moquet did with his Dislike Button Firefox extension.

Browser Extensions

This brings us to the last theme, browser extensions. The fourth and final group promoted the Firefox extension for a Dislike Button made by Moquet. According to those who use it, the extension works very well, but there is one fundamental problem.

Like applications that try to implement a Dislike Button, this Firefox extension uses its own servers. According to the article “An unofficial way to dislike things on Facebook” on cnet.com, this means that in order for other people to see the “dislikes”, they not only have to use Firefox, but they also have to add the browser extension. Further, some people have reported having problems with the extension after a while.

Summary

While groups, pages, applications and browser extensions claim they have a fully working Dislike Button, none of them actually work FULLY. The only way we’ll actually get a real, fully working Dislike Button is if the Facebook programmers add it themselves.

Until then, anyone claiming they have a working Dislike Button gets a big "thumbs down".