The social giant Facebook has been busy in making group conversations in Messenger to be a lot like, Facebook.
New functions are being rolled out to Facebook Messenger, including reactions to messages, photos and videos sent via the app. The idea here comes straight from the Facebook itself, where users can already react to status updates and posts with a "like" or a "heart," for example. This is to make group chats more fun and more intuitive.
The key difference is that the Messenger reactions include a thumbs-down, or "dislike" button, still not available on the social network.
In a blog post announcing the update, Facebook's product manager for Messenger, Drew Moxon, said: "Message Reactions are the ability to react to an individual message with a specific emotion, quickly showing acknowledgement or expressing how you feel in a lightweight way."
Messenger also includes the mentions feature where users can notify someone using the '@' symbol followed by the name of the person in conversations. That person can then join the conversation by answering the message.
Facebook users have been wanting a 'dislike' button for years, but founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had always been against it, fearing it to cause negative feelings and even bullying or trolling. But putting the feature to Messenger, Facebook hopes that it won't do much damage as messaging is a more private function that a global one, like Facebook's social network.
For users that want to dislike a post, Facebook has added the 'dislike' reaction to the existing 'Love', 'Happy', 'Wow', 'Sad', 'Angry' and 'Like'. Users just need to open the conversation and hold the message they want to react to. A pop-up will show the icons of the seven reactions.
To remove a reaction, users can tap and hold the message and select the reaction again.
Any reaction will appear under the message, and everyone in that conversation can see it. Users can turn message reaction notifications off at any time in Settings.