Well, the purpose of Reactions isn&#x27;t to &quot;provide a dislike button&quot; like a lot of people wanted.<p>The purpose of reactions is to provide an alternative for people who don&#x27;t want to click &quot;Like&quot; on stories of tragedy (e.g. someone&#x27;s loved one dying, someone announcing they have cancer, or even something non-personal like a news article about a mass shooting) because it sounds inappropriate, like &quot;ha ha, I&#x27;m enjoying your tragedy!&quot;. There are two reasons why this is important:<p>1. Some people want to exhibit support but don&#x27;t know what to say, so they&#x27;re not comfortable commenting. On more positive stories, they&#x27;ll just hit &quot;Like&quot;, but that would feel inappropriate to do on a more negative story, so they don&#x27;t do anything even though they want to express their support.<p>2. Facebook&#x27;s News Feed algorithm uses Likes to determine how articles are sorted in your News Feed. If people don&#x27;t Like important stories because they feel the word &quot;Like&quot; is inappropriate, then those stories will be downranked because the algorithm doesn&#x27;t know the stories are supposed to be important.<p>Reactions solve both by allowing people to both wordlessly express sympathy for and signal-boost stories that they feel would be inappropriate to &quot;Like&quot;.