Social network Bluesky, which on Friday announced a new milestone of 40 million users, will soon start testing “dislikes” as a way to improve personalization on its main Discover feed and others.
The news was shared alongside a host of other conversation control updates and changes, which include smaller tweaks to replies, improved detection of toxic comments, and other ways to prioritize more relevant conversations to the individual user.
With the “dislikes” beta rolling out soon, Bluesky will take into account the new signal to improve user personalization. As users “dislike” posts, the system will learn what sort of content they want to see less of. This will help to inform more than just how content is ranked in feeds, but also reply rankings.
The company explained the changes are designed to make Bluesky a place for more “fun, genuine, and respectful exchanges” — an edict that follows a month of unrest on the platform as some users again criticized the platform over its moderation decisions. While Bluesky is designed as a decentralized network where users run their own moderation, some subset of Bluesky users want the platform itself to ban bad actors and controversial figures instead of leaving it up to the users to block them.
Bluesky, however, wants to focus more on the tools it provides users to control their own experience.
Today, this includes things like moderation lists that let users quickly block a group of people they don’t want to interact with, content filter controls, muted words, and the ability to subscribe to other moderation service providers. Bluesky also lets users detach quote posts to limit unwanted attention, which has long influenced the toxic culture of “dunking” on X (formerly Twitter).
In addition to dislikes, the company says it’s testing a mix of ranking updates, design changes, and other feedback tools to improve the conversations on its network.
This includes a new system that will map out the “social neighborhoods” on Bluesky, meaning the connections between people who often interact and reply to one another. Bluesky says it’s prioritizing replies from people “closer to your neighborhood,” to make conversations you’re shown in your feed more relevant and familiar. The new “dislikes” may have some influence here, as well, Bluesky says.
This, in particular, is an area where competitor Threads, from Meta, has been challenged at times.
As newsletter writer Max Read noted last year, Threads tended to land its users in a confusing feed where conversations they weren’t connected to would appear, sometimes in mid-story. Read remarked that “it’s often impossible to figure out who is replying to whom and where and why you’re seeing certain posts. They appear from nowhere and lead to nowhere,” he wrote at the time.
Bluesky’s plan to map out social neighborhoods could address this issue as it scales.
The company also said its latest model does a better job at detecting replies that are “toxic, spammy, off-topic, or posted in bad faith,” and downranks these in threads, search results, and notifications.
Another change to the Reply button will now take users to the full thread instead of straight into the compose screen, which may encourage users to read the thread before responding.
This, says Bluesky, is a simple way to “reduce content collapse and redundant replies” — another criticism that tends to be levied at Twitter/X.
Plus, the company is tweaking the reply settings feature to make it more visible to users that they can control who is allowed to respond to their posts.