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Hey, Facebook – these are the new Like buttons you should have used

'Yay'? 'Sad'? Nah, this is what we really need

Pic + vid Facebook has announced a range of new buttons intended to give its users the ability to express a wider range of emotions – certainly wider than today's "Like."

The buttons, labelled with emojis, cover common feelings such as excitement, sadness, anger, and so on and will be made available first to users in Spain and Ireland. Facebook will look at feedback and decide whether to roll the feature out further.

The company's chief product officer Chris Cox posted a video to his public Facebook feed to show how the process would work on a mobile phone.

While Facebook's response is a novel one and more expansive than simply providing a "Dislike" button that people have been bugging the social media company to roll out for a number of years, some feel that the new emojis are a little too restrictive.

While fun, the new options are unlikely to capture the most frequent responses that Facebook users wish to append to their friends and complete strangers' posts, depending on their privacy settings and whatever Facebook has decided it wants people to see that week.

Such is the importance of Facebook to society's well-being, however, that we at The Register decided to carry out extensive research and customer modeling using the most recent techniques in cutting-edge design fabrication to provide an enhanced experience for users – and provide the results of that work, for free, to Mr Zuckerberg and his glorified curtain-twitchers.

Here, then, are The Register's new Facebook Like buttons to slap on friends' posts:

  • Like: The classic.
  • Click Bait: For article links that people click on despite themselves and then feel like they've let themselves down shortly afterwards. The sort of posts that make you feel society has just got a little worse. Upworthy and BuzzFeed articles will be tagged with this option as a default.
  • Idiot: To confirm that the author of the post is lacking in common sense and/or rational analysis. Most useful for politics and health issues.
  • Umm: A useful passive-aggressive way of letting your friends know that you may want to take this post down or at least edit it heavily before others read it.
  • Fresh Air: A positive, life-affirming choice that says to people: "Maybe it's time you took a break from your laptop and went out into the real world for a bit."
  • Privacy: A direct link to the privacy settings for this particular post's author so you are able to block, unfriend, or report them in one easy tap.
  • Holiday: A "Fresh Air" Superlike. A firm encouragement that perhaps it's time both you and the author take an extended holiday from Facebook and do something useful with your lives rather than just read others' mindless thoughts and respond to them with equally mindless comments and emojis.

You're welcome, Facebook. ®

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