I just saw something in my Facebook news feed that annoyed and slightly upset me. That was my first reaction. Now I’ve had time to think about it, I realise that there are a number of different interpretations open regarding what I saw – so here it is in a nifty little screen grab.

As you can see, someone likes the announcement an RNLI lifeboat has launched in order to help or rescue a person or group of people who could be in serious trouble.

If you look carefully you’ll notice the message was sent from their Twitter account. With the normal 140 character restrictions of Twitter, this was actually a two part announcement, with the second part stating they had launched to help four kayakers who had got into difficulty near Tantallon Castle – an extremely rocky and potentially dangerous location.

My immediate knee-jerk reaction was astonishment that someone could be so callous as to “Like” the fact that someone was potentially in considerable danger and needed the urgent help of the RNLI. After calming down and considering it, I’ve realised that there a number of things the person may have been thinking when clicking “Like”, so here are just a small number.

• “I hate kayakers, it’s great they’re in danger.”
• “Ooh, a shiny new post and I’m the first to see it. Quick, better click Like before someone else does!”
• “It’s a shame someone is in trouble, but it’s wonderful we have an outstanding service like the RNLI to be there when they’re needed. I like this a great deal.”

There are, of course, any number of additional options and I’ll let you fill those in yourself if you’re really bored enough – but in your own heads please, this post is really about Facebook and the inadequate options for responding to such a post.

On Facebook, you basically have two options to respond to a post. You can “Like” it as shown above, or you can add a comment to it. The first option of “Like”ing the post, in many circumstances, is absolutely fine and causes no problems. “I’ve just won the lottery!” *clicks Like* – absolutely fine, even if you are really thinking “Bastard, it should have been me.” it still gets the message across nicely. Then there are those times where seeing that someone has clicked “Like” tells you absolutely nothing about what they meant, as in the RNLI situation I began this article with.

If you choose to go down the route of adding a comment, you have a greater ability to express your feelings clearly. Not everyone has the time or inclination to add a well constructed comment to a post and given the number of posts in their news feed every day, this is perfectly understandable.

So what are the alternatives? I’m not certain what the best option would be, but there has a loud call for at least a “Do not like” or similar worded button for quite some time now. That might be a start, however the combination of those two options would still not help in some situations, such as the RNLI one above. After all, clicking “Do not like” could be taken as the exact opposite of my knee jerk reaction. “What? This person does not like the fact that the RNLI are on hand to give assistance when required?” would be just as unhelpful.

A friend I spoke to about this mentioned a couple of other options in use on other social media sites and neither of those seem especially useful either. One such option being a thumbs up or down icon – basically a graphic version of “Like” and “Do not like”, so no better in use. Another option was to have a large number of options available on a drop down selector – but then there’s the chance of having so many options you can’t be bothered selecting an appropriate one, or there still isn’t one that reflects your true intent anyway!

Whatever the best solution would be, or even a better solution (answers on a postcard to… oh wait, just enter a comment below, that’s probably easier), we’re unlikely to see Facebook adopt it any time soon as their commitment to making things easy to use or helpful is pretty much non-existent. This leaves us with the issue of how we use such systems right now. Perhaps the best option is just to be a little more thoughtful about what you’re actually saying when you click “Like”. I have actually seen people click “Like” on posts along the lines of “I’ve just lost my job” or “I broke my arm last night” which seems just bizarre unless you genuinely don’t like the person … in which case why have them as a “friend”?

I’m as guilty as anyone else with a careless use of “Like” from time to time. Although I’m also guilty of not being especially careful with the phrasing of a comment when added in haste while thinking about something else, feeling a bit grumpy about something or just simply rushing the comment because I’m busy.

I don’t know what the short term solution is – it’s simply not human nature to stop and consider every minor action before enacting it and the current design of social netowrks seems to encourage knee jerk reaction over rational thought at the best of times. I welcome comments below, or perhaps just “Like” this post so it shows in your news feed and some friends see it…