Social network Bluesky, which recently announced a new milestone of 40 million users, will soon begin testing a “dislikes” feature. This new tool is intended to improve personalization on its main Discover feed and other areas of the platform.
The news was shared alongside a collection of other conversation control updates. These include smaller tweaks to replies, improved detection of toxic comments, and new methods to prioritize more relevant conversations for each user.
With the “dislikes” beta rolling out soon, Bluesky will use this new signal to enhance user personalization. As users dislike posts, the system will learn what kind of content they want to see less of. This information will help inform not only how content is ranked in feeds but also how replies are ordered.
The company explained these changes are designed to make Bluesky a place for more fun, genuine, and respectful exchanges. This direction follows a period of unrest on the platform where some users criticized its moderation decisions.
While Bluesky is designed as a decentralized network where users run their own moderation, some users want the platform itself to ban bad actors and controversial figures instead of leaving it up to individual users to block them. Bluesky, however, wants to focus more on providing users with tools to control their own experience.
These tools currently include moderation lists that let users quickly block a group of people, content filter controls, muted words, and the ability to subscribe to other moderation service providers. Bluesky also lets users detach quote posts to limit unwanted attention, a feature that addresses the toxic culture of public criticism found on other platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter.
In addition to dislikes, the company is testing a mix of ranking updates, design changes, and other feedback tools to improve conversations. This includes a new system that will map out the “social neighborhoods” on Bluesky, meaning the connections between people who often interact. Bluesky says it will prioritize replies from people closer to your neighborhood to make the conversations in your feed more relevant and familiar. The new dislikes feature may also influence this.
This specific area is one where competitor Threads, from Meta, has faced challenges. Observers have noted that Threads can place users in a confusing feed where unrelated conversations appear, sometimes in the middle of a story, making it difficult to understand the context of posts.
Bluesky’s plan to map out social neighborhoods could address this issue as the platform grows. The company also said its latest model is better at detecting replies that are toxic, spammy, off-topic, or posted in bad faith, and it downranks these in threads, search results, and notifications.
Another change involves the Reply button, which will now take users to the full thread instead of straight to the compose screen. This is intended to encourage users to read the thread before responding. Bluesky says this is a simple way to reduce redundant replies and information overload, another common criticism of other social platforms.
Additionally, the company is tweaking the reply settings feature to make it more visible to users, ensuring they know they can control who is allowed to respond to their posts.