dislike button

dislike button (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

We’ve all been there. Someone posts an article on Facebook that is just The Worst, as far as we are concerned. It attacks our beliefs, our race, our gender and we couldn’t possibly like it less. But when she shared it, the poster made it clear that she didn’t care for it either. In fact, she’s got just about the perfect commentary on it, a witty or funny take-down of the whole stupid piece that made us laugh aloud, nod our head because she just expressed it perfectly. Screw that original article but her comment? THAT we like. If you’ve been in this situation, you know the dilemma I’m talking about. Because a Facebook share is a single status and the link and posters comments are a package deal. If you want to hit the like button to show that you agree with or otherwise endorse what that poster is saying, you’re also liking the original article.

That means Facebook will push that article to your friends as something you liked and you’ll be driving more attention and traffic back to that stupid article when, really, all you wanted to do was show support from the original poster’s awesome comment.  The way Facebook’s algorithm works, even if you just common on that post to say, “Hate this article but love your comment!” that increases the visibility of the share on the site, pushes it to your friends and gives the article of the hated link more traffic.

There’s no good solution right now but it seems like a simple enough fix. Why can’t Facebook just let you like the poster’s comment separately from the content they shared? I’m pretty sure that I know why but I’ll turn it over to you.

How would you improve link sharing if you were in charge of Facebook?