You may soon be able to give posts the thumbs-down on Bluesky. The Twitter dupe recently announced it would be testing a "dislike" button, aimed at improving the personalization of users' feeds.
The idea is that thumbs-downing posts you don't like will directly affect the posts you see in your feed.
Wrote Bluesky about the test feature in a blog post:
You May Also Like
"Soon, we’ll start testing a 'dislike' option as a new feedback signal to improve personalization in Discover and other feeds. Dislikes help the system understand what kinds of posts you’d prefer to see less of. They may also lightly inform reply ranking, reducing the visibility of low-quality replies. Dislikes are private and the signal isn’t global — it mainly affects your own experience and, to an extent, others in your social neighborhood."
So, to be clear, dislikes won't be visible to the public — meaning people won't see what you dislike or how many dislikes any given post might have.
While that's not a drastic change to how Bluesky works, it could lead to an improvement for daily scrolling. Bluesky's "Discover" tab is widely ignored — or worse, hated — by its power users because it's largely filled with corny posts that racked up likes. As writer Mike Pearl noted at Gizmodo, if the dislike button were to actually filter out posts and subjects you dislike, it could prove to transform the Discover tab into something "useful and maybe even dangerously addictive."
The internet is full of bad posts, but it seems like soon you might be able to do something about it on Bluesky.
Topics Bluesky
Tim Marcin is an Associate Editor on the culture team at Mashable, where he mostly digs into the weird parts of the internet. You'll also see some coverage of memes, tech, sports, trends, and the occasional hot take. You can find him on Bluesky (sometimes), Instagram (infrequently), or eating Buffalo wings (as often as possible).
