Social network Bluesky announced that it has reached a new milestone of 40 million users and will soon begin testing a «dislike» feature to improve content personalization in the feed.
Social network Bluesky announced that it has reached a new milestone of 40 million users and will soon begin testing a «dislike» feature to improve content personalization in the feed.
With the start of beta testing of the dislike feature, Bluesky will take into account a new signal to improve user personalization. When users dislike posts, the system will learn what content they want to see less often. This will help not only determine the rating of content in feeds, but also the rating of replies, TechCrunch notes.
The company explains that the changes are intended to make Bluesky a more «fun, honest, and respectful» place, after users criticized the platform’s moderation. While Bluesky is designed as a decentralized network where users themselves moderate, some users want the platform itself to ban unscrupulous users and controversial personalities.
However, Bluesky wants to focus more on the tools it gives users to control their own experience. These include moderation lists that allow users to 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 providers. Bluesky also allows users to unlink quoted posts to limit unwanted attention.
In addition to dislikes, the company says it is testing a combination of rating updates, design changes, and other feedback tools to improve communication on its social network.
This includes a new system that will display «social neighborhoods» on Bluesky, i.e. connections between people who frequently interact and reply to each other. Bluesky says it prioritizes replies from people «closer to your neighborhood» to make the conversations you see in your feed more relevant and familiar. The new «dislikes» could also have some impact on this.
It was previously reported that during 2024, the audience of the Bluesky social network grew from 2.89 million to 25.94 million users, i.e. increased 9 times. Due to this growth, content moderators have more work to do, so the company decided to provide them with psychological counseling to «ease the burden of viewing this content».
