Social network Bluesky, which announced a new milestone of 40 million users on Friday, will soon begin testing “dislikes” as a way to improve personalization in places like the main Discover feed.
This news was shared along with a number of other conversation controls updates and changes, including small adjustments to replies, improved detection of harmful comments, and other ways to prioritize conversations that are more relevant to individual users.
With the “dislike” beta rolling out soon, Bluesky plans to take new signals into account to improve user personalization. When a user “dislikes” a post, the system learns the type of content the user doesn't want to see. This helps you learn not only how your content ranks in your feed, but also the ranking of your replies.
The company said the changes are aimed at making Bluesky a more “fun, honest, and respectful place for interaction.” This decree follows a month of turmoil on the platform as some users once again criticized the platform over moderation decisions. Although Bluesky is designed as a decentralized network where users perform their own moderation, some Bluesky users would like the platform itself to ban bad or controversial figures rather than leaving it up to users to do so.
But Bluesky wants to focus more on the tools it gives users to control their experience.
Currently, this includes moderation lists that allow users to quickly block groups of people they don't want to interact with, content filter controls, muted words, the ability to register with other moderation service providers, and more. Bluesky also allows users to separate quote posts to limit unwanted attention. This has long contributed to a toxic culture of “soaking” on X (formerly Twitter).
The company says it is testing a combination of rating updates, design changes, and other feedback tools to improve conversations on the network.
This includes a new system that maps connections between “social neighborhoods” on Bluesky, people who frequently interact and reply to each other. BlueSky says it prioritizes responses from people “close to your neighborhood” to make the conversations you see in your feed more relevant and relatable. Brusky says the new “hate” may have some influence here as well.
This, in particular, is an area that competitor Meta's Threads has struggled with from time to time.
As newsletter writer Max Reid pointed out last year, Threads tends to direct users to confusing feeds, where conversations that aren't relevant to them sometimes appear in the middle of a story. “It's often impossible to understand who is replying to whom, where, or why a particular post is showing up. Posts come out of nowhere and end up nowhere,” Reid wrote at the time.
Blue Sky's plan for social neighborhoods could address this issue as it scales up.
The company also said its latest model is better able to detect replies that are “harmful, spammy, off-topic, or maliciously posted” and will lower the ranking of these replies in threads, search results, and notifications.
Another change to the (Reply) button now takes users through the entire thread instead of going directly to the compose screen, potentially prompting users to read the thread before responding.
According to Bluesky, this is an easy way to “reduce content collapse and redundant replies,” another common criticism of Twitter/X.
Additionally, the company has tweaked its reply settings feature to make it easier for users to control who can reply to their posts.