Bluesky Hits 40 Million Users, Tests Dislike Feature

Bluesky, a decentralised social media platform that celebrated reaching 40 million users on Friday, will soon begin experimenting with “dislikes” in an effort to enhance personalisation on its Discover feed and other platforms.

A number of other conversation control enhancements and modifications were also released with the announcement, including minor adjustments to replies, enhanced toxic comment identification, and other methods to give priority to more pertinent conversations for each user.

In order to help the system learn preferences and improve content and reply rankings, the most recent feature will let users mark posts they don’t want to see.

Following widespread criticism of their moderation strategy, the firm hopes to provide a “fun, genuine, and respectful exchange” with this update.

Bluesky will take into consideration the new signal to enhance user personalisation as the “dislikes” beta is about to launch. Users will be able to tell the algorithm what kind of content they would prefer to see less of as they “dislike” posts. Reaction rankings as well as content ranking in feeds will benefit from this.

The firm claims to be trying a variety of design modifications, ranking upgrades, and other feedback mechanisms in addition to dislikes in order to enhance the discussions on its network.

Through content filters, bespoke moderation services, moderation lists, and muted terms, the site primarily focusses on giving users control over their experience rather than outright banning contentious people.

A new technology that will map out Bluesky’s “social neighborhoods” that is, the relationships between people who frequently communicate and respond to one another is also part of this. Bluesky claims that in order to make the conversations you see in your feed more familiar and relevant, it is giving priority to responses from users who are “closer to your neighbourhood.” Bluesky suggests that the new “dislikes” might also play a role in this situation.

Threads, a competitor from Meta, has occasionally faced challenges in this specific area.

Following a month of turmoil on the platform as some users once again criticised the platform over its moderation decisions, the firm claimed that the modifications are intended to make Bluesky a place for more “fun, genuine, and respectful exchanges.” Despite the fact that Bluesky is a decentralised network with user-run moderation, some Bluesky users desire the platform to ban problematic individuals and bad actors rather than letting users do so.

Nonetheless, Bluesky wishes to put more emphasis on the resources it offers customers to manage their own experience.

These days, these include features like content filter controls, muted words and the option to subscribe to various moderation service providers, and moderation lists that enable users to instantly ban a group of persons they don’t want to communicate with. To reduce unwanted attention, Bluesky also allows it users to remove quote posts, a feature that has long contributed to the harmful culture of “dunking” on X (previously Twitter).

In order to enhance the discussions on its network, the business claims to be experimenting a variety of design modifications, ranking upgrades, and other feedback mechanisms in addition to dislikes.

A new technology that will map out Bluesky’s “social neighborhoods” that is, the relationships between people who frequently communicate and respond to one another is part of this. In order to make the conversations you see in your feed more relevant and recognisable, Bluesky claims to be giving priority to responses from users who are “closer to your neighbourhood.” Bluesky suggests that the new “dislikes” might also play a role in this situation.

Threads, a competitor from Meta, has occasionally faced challenges in this specific area.

Last year, Max Read, a newsletter writer, observed that Threads had a tendency to place readers in a perplexing stream where conversations they were unrelated to would occasionally show up in the middle of a narrative. Read stated that “it’s frequently impossible to determine where, why, and who is responding to whom in certain posts.” He remarked at the time, “They come out of nowhere and lead to nowhere.”

This problem may be resolved as it grows using Bluesky’s proposal to map out social neighbourhoods.

The upcoming feature, which is noteworthy, would prioritise responses from known connections by mapping out “social neighbourhoods,” or groupings of users that interact frequently.

Additionally, the company said that its most recent model is more effective at identifying responses that are “toxic, spammy, off-topic, or posted in bad faith” and lowers their ranking in threads, search results, and notifications.

Users may be encouraged to read the post before replying as a result of another modification to the Reply button that now directs users to the entire topic rather than the compose screen.

Bluesky claims that this is an easy method to “reduce content collapse and redundant replies,” which is another objection that is frequently made about Twitter/X.

To further highlight and clarify to consumers that they have control over who can reply to their postings, the firm is making changes to the reply settings tool.

To encourage users to read the entire topic before responding and to remove unnecessary messages, another update changes the Reply button to open the entire thread first.

As the platform expands, Bluesky said these upgrades are meant to improve the user experience.