Bluesky, the new social media platform incubated by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has reached a remarkable goal. It now has 40 million users – it’s the underdog success story of the year! That’s quite a milestone as the platform gets ready to roll out a suite of new features designed to increase positive user engagement and mitigate toxicity. Among some of the most exciting features is a beta test for a “dislikes” button. Bluesky thinks this will improve personalization across its Discover feed and elsewhere.
The addition of the “dislikes” feature is an important new step in giving users tools to more actively express their preferences. Bluesky aims to make social media a much less vitriolic place. They first hope to do this by giving users greater ability to convey emotions online. We believe that improving these details will make for a better experience for all users. It will cut down on “content collapse,” which happens when people are having unrelated discussions that fill up the influencer’s feed.
In response to concerns over receiving unwanted attention, Bluesky has introduced the ability for users to unthread quote posts. This powerful feature makes it easy for regular folks to share rich, informative content. Second, it reduces bad faith engagement from users not involved in the discussion. This method has been successful in preventing the harmful content and bad experiences that we’ve all witnessed on other networks.
Bluesky is dedicated to fostering healthy interactions between users by equipping them with tools that encourage authentic and respectful conversations. The platform rolled out moderation lists to allow users to block entire swathes of individuals they don’t want to interact with. Beyond this, users have content filter controls, giving them the ability to tailor usage to their preferences even more. With tools such as muted words, users can customize their feeds to show what they want — what they like, or what they’re interested in learning about.
In direct response to user feedback, Bluesky is changing its reply settings feature so it’s more prominent and obvious. This change will give users more control. It will unambiguously show them who is allowed to reply to their Tweets, increasing their ability to manage their experience.
Despite these advancements, Bluesky was rocked recently for a month by a controversy over its moderation decisions. As one user pointed out, their main frustration was with the disorienting feed that forced conversations to be viewed with no context. As Max Read articulated, “it’s often impossible to figure out who is replying to whom and where and why you’re seeing certain posts. They seem to materialize out of thin air and go back to thin air.” This commentary highlights the challenges users have faced in navigating the platform.
Bluesky’s leadership knows that it can’t have too many of these surprises. The company is actively working to fix the perplexing feed experience and enhance user satisfaction by implementing new features while refining existing ones. The idea of sparking something joyful and cultivating an atmosphere for authentic exchanges continues to be at the heart of Bluesky as well.
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