This makes very little sense. It's essentially a completely arbitrary subset of all Unicode emoticons. And of course it's always been possible to use Emoji in comments, meaning there would now be two ways to say the same thing (one of which is tracked differently by Facebook, presumably).

All they needed to do is create simple short-cut links for auto-submitting one-character Emoji comments, and then say that from now on a comment of "thumbs-up" is a Like. That way, any comment that contains a key Emoji character could be interpreted similarly by Facebook without requiring a button press. And, if they decide to track even more Emoji in the future, they could just do it and they'd already have an archive of comment text to build from instead of having to create a new link again.

IMHO it's absurd: 5 ways to express positive, and only 2 for negative. If you're not positive about something, then you're either sad or angry. Odd continuum from "Like" to "Angry" -- not the one I think most people operate on. It seems Zuck just really wants only positive feedback. Feedback from "angry" and "sad" people is easily dismissed and ignored.

Oh well, reason (n+1) of why I'm glad I don't use Facebook. It is a more a phenomenon to be observed.

Of the 4 basic emotions, missing only: fear/surprise.

"A commonly-held belief, first proposed by Dr Paul Ekman, posits there are six basic emotions which are universally recognised and easily interpreted through specific facial expressions, regardless of language or culture. These are: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust."

Recent research melds these into just 4, combining fear/surprise and anger/disgust. http://www.gla.ac.uk/news/archiveofnews/2014/february/headli...

I don't really like it. Users wanted a dislike button, they should have gotten it.

Dislike on this! :)

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10355556