The social network Bluesky, which on Friday announced a new 40 million user milestonewill soon begin testing dislikes as a way to improve personalization in the main Discover feed and others.
The news was shared along with a number of others chat control updates and changeswhich include minor tweaks to replies, improved detection of toxic comments, and other ways to prioritize conversations most relevant to the individual user.
With “dislike” beta coming soon, Bluesky will consider the new badge to improve user personalization. As users “unlike” posts, the system will learn what kind of content they want to see less of. This will help inform more than how content ranks in feeds, but also how answers rank.
The company explained that the changes are designed to make Bluesky a place for more “fun, genuine and respectful exchanges” — an edict that follows a month of turmoil on the platform, as some users again criticized the platform for its moderation decisions. While Bluesky is designed as a decentralized network where users perform their own moderation, a subset of Bluesky users want the platform itself to ban bad actors and controversial figures instead of letting users block them.
Bluesky, however, wants to focus more on the tools it gives users to control their own experience.
Today, this includes things like moderation lists that allow users to quickly block a group of people they don’t want to interact with, content filter controls, mute words, and the ability to subscribe to other moderation service providers. Bluesky also allows users to unlink quote posts to limit unwanted attention, which has long plagued its toxic culture.sinking” on X (formerly Twitter).
Dislikes aside, the company says it’s testing a combination of ranking updates, design changes and other feedback tools to improve conversations on its network.
This includes a new system that will map “social neighborhoods” in Bluesky, meaning the connections between people who frequently interact with and respond to each other. Bluesky says it prioritizes responses from people “closer to your neighborhood,” to make the conversations that appear in your feed more relevant and familiar. New “dislikes” may have some influence here, too, Bluesky says.
This, in particular, is an area where competitor Threads, from Meta, has been challenged at times.
As a newsletter writer Max Read occurred last yearThreads tended to drag its users into a confusing stream where conversations they weren’t connected to would pop up, sometimes mid-story. Read noted that “it’s often impossible to tell who’s replying to whom, where and why you’re seeing certain posts. They appear out of nowhere and lead nowhere,” he wrote at the time.
Bluesky’s plan to map social neighborhoods could address this issue as it scales.
The company also said its latest model does a better job of spotting responses that are “toxic, spammy, off-topic or maliciously posted” and demotes them in threads, search results and notifications.
Another change to the Reply button will now take users to the full thread instead of straight to the compose screen, which may encourage users to read the thread before replying.
This, Bluesky says, is a simple way to “reduce content collapse and redundant replies”—another criticism that tends to be leveled at Twitter/X.
Additionally, the company is tweaking its reply settings feature to make it more visible to users that they can control who is allowed to reply to their posts.
