Bluesky Will Test a ‘Dislike’ Option. It Could Help Fix a Huge Problem

Bluesky is the social media platform most similar to Twitter before Elon Musk took it over, but it’s its own thing and has its own problems. One of those issues is a terrible “Discover” tab, which could be greatly improved by adding a “dislike” feature currently for a beta release.

in Blog post from Friday That included disclaimers, Bluesky wrote, explaining how it always gives users “tools that give people more control over how they interact on Bluesky.” This is an almost comedic understatement. Bluesky’s culture is deliberately built around silencing yourself, and only seeing things you like.

So, for example, when the White House joins Democratic-leaning Bluesky, thousands of users immediately They used themselves The site’s unusually strong blocking feature, which greatly reduces network effects, and as a result, counts for very little engagement for the Trump administration. Reposts counted on the White House Bluesky post Rarely exceeds 70And the vast majority of users of the site simply do not notice that the account still exists.

But it’s ideal for Bluesky users to block early and often to encounter something they don’t like, for whatever reason. Even if you wish someone well, you can block them because their posting style annoys you a bit.

In other words, Bluesky is a highly effective and shameless echo chamber. But it’s unclear whether blocking someone will have any effect on whether you’ll later be served more content like the one you blocked.

Enter Dislike, according to Bluesky’s blog post, is supposed to be a “new feedback signal” that will “enhance personalization on Discover and other feeds.” Adding a “like” to each block has the potential to strengthen the app and its culture—especially features related to the Discover feed.

Bluesky’s Discover feed feels like a cesspool because, while everyone’s a little different, it’s mostly at the top of the Bluesky bell curve. If you use the app at all, you probably enjoy, at least to some extent, Elon Musk’s clowning, rants about AI, saccharine posts about pets, empowering selfies, clowning on transphobes, random cute photos, and what have you. But the returns are quickly diminishing in a feed that firehose you with these things, and that’s the experience in the Bluesky Discover tab. Meh an avalanche of posts.

While some enjoy the Discover feed—a common complaint among larger accounts is the Discover tab Publish their posts to annoying respondents—Discover Feed is exactly this idea sucks And Generic should never be used.

“Likes help the system understand what types of posts you want to see less of,” claims Bluesky’s blog post. If that turns out to be true, the Discover tab could finally fill a void: to keep things fresh, Bluesky needs to have a proper place to encounter new types of content without answer threads. The chronological following tab gets boring after a while (it’s basically drowning in posts from users you like, but who post a ton).

If Dislike is a powerful and effective function that has the ability to zap entire categories of things out of existence for the user, it could herald a whole new bluesky: one where the Discover tab can be useful and even dangerously addictive. But if the dislike does not go for the jugular, then it is good. There are always old, reliable blocks.