The social network Bluesky, having announced a new milestone of 40 million users on Friday, will soon roll out its first testing of “dislikes” to further hone in personalization signals like those on its primary Discover feed.
Bluesky announced the change in a blog post sharing a slew of updates to discussions and update controls, including more minor adjustments to replies, better labeling of emblematically “toxic” comments, and other means of promoting topics more likely to matter to the individual user. The “dislike” beta will be available shortly thereafter, and Bluesky will weigh the updated signal to help further its insight into personalization.
As users dislike posts, the system will learn that they want to see fewer such posts, and that information will affect not only the ranking of content in feeds but also reply rankings.
The company says these adjustments are meant to “fun, genuine, and respectful exchanges” at Bluesky — a dictum that comes after a month of turmoil as people once again took to the platform to complain about moderation decisions.
Yet, a subset of Bluesky users does want the platform itself to forswear bad actors and arguable figures rather than forcing them to interfere when the users want the Ban-Bad-Actor-Instead feature. Blue sky, on its end, wants to focus on the tools it gives end-users to control their own experience.
Today ranges from moderation lists that allow end-users to swipe to block everyone in a specific genre they don’t want to interact with, through content filters, suspension words, to subscribing to other moderation services. Bluesky also lets users divert footing posts, which have a strong influence on the poisonous atmosphere of the first X-called culture.
The company notes that Bluesky is also experimenting with “a combination of ranking updates, design changes, and new feedback mechanisms” to enhance the discussions on the network. For example, a new system that the company is rolling out will “plot out the ‘social neighborhoods’” on Bluesky — that is, the various connections between people who frequently interact and respond to each other, Bluesky states. The company adds that it “prioritizes replies from people ‘closer to your neighborhood,’”
In other words, Bluesky prefers the conversations you are likely to notice in your feed and with which you are most accustomed to familiarizing yourself. The new dislikes could exert some impact in this area as well, Bluesky believes. This is an arena in which competitor Threads, from Meta, has faced challenges on occasion, specifically.
Threads, as newsletter writer Max Read noted last year, “tends to drop its users into a bewildering feed populated by conversations they have no tie to”, frequently in the middle of one. “It’s regularly difficult to determine who is responding to whom and where and why your view is filtered the way it is. They emerge inexplicably and go nowhere,” he wrote at the time.
When Bluesky starts to scale, the strategy of digitally mapping social neighborhoods might help solve this issue, too. The organization states that its latest model will do a better job spotting replies “toxic, spammy, off-topic, or posted in bad faith”, and suppresses them in threads, search findings, delta, and notices. Finally, there’s the matter of the Reply button.
Now, when users click on it, they’ll be taken to a full-thread view instead of directly to the compose window; in theory, they’ll be more inclined to read the thread before responding. This, according to Bluesky, is a “swift win” since it “reduces content collapse and redundancies.” The company is additionally altering the reply settings button to make it even more identifiable to users that they can restrict who can respond to their posts.
About BlueSky
Bluesky is a social media platform created as a decentralized alternative to traditional networks such as X – the platform previously known as Twitter. Established to grant users full control of their data and identity online, Bluesky employs the AT Protocol, or AT, which ensures open interoperable social networking. The platform enables the users to select algorithms, moderate content, share their unique account on different servers without losing followers, and promotes a simple design language and a strong user privacy orientation. Bluesky has become popular as a clean, community-created space for online discussion.
