Bluesky is the social media platform that most resembles Twitter before it was taken over by Elon Musk, but it’s its own thing, and it has its own problems. One of those problems is a horrible “Discover” tab, something that might be greatly improved by adding the “dislike” feature currently headed for a beta release.
In the blog post from Friday that included the announcement of dislike, Bluesky wrote about how it has always provided users with “tools that give people more control over how they interact on Bluesky.” This is an almost comedic understatement. The culture of Bluesky is built around intentionally siloing yourself in, and only seeing things you like.
So, for instance, when the White House joined the Democratic-leaning Bluesky, thousands of users immediately availed themselves of the site’s unusually powerful blocking feature, resulting in a greatly diminished network effect, and as a consequence, very low engagement counts for the Trump Administration. The repost count on a White House Bluesky post rarely exceeds 70, and the vast majority of users on the site simply don’t notice the account still exists.
But blocking early and often is the norm for Bluesky users encountering anything they don’t like, for any reason. Even if you wish someone well, you might block them simply because their posting style irks you slightly.
In other words, Bluesky is a highly effective and shameless echo chamber. But it’s not clear that blocking someone has any effect whatsoever on whether more content similar to what you just blocked will be served to you later.
Enter dislike, which will be a “new feedback signal” that’s supposed to “improve personalization in Discover and other feeds,” according to Bluesky’s blog post. Adding a “dislike” to every block has the potential to bolster the have-it-your-way attributes of the app and its culture—particularly where the Discover feed is concerned.
The Discover feed on Bluesky feels like a cesspool because, while everyone’s is a little different, it’s mostly the top of the Bluesky bell curve. If you use the app at all, there is probably at least some extent to which you enjoy clowning on Elon Musk, outrage about AI, saccharine posts about pets, empowering selfies, clowning on transphobes, random nice photos, and what have you. But the returns rapidly diminish in a feed that firehoses you with these things, and that’s the experience on the Bluesky Discover tab. An avalanche of meh posts.
While some clearly enjoy the Discover feed—a common complaint among big accounts is that the Discover tab exposes their posts to annoying repliers—the idea that the Discover feed just sucks and should never be used is common.
“Dislikes help the system understand what kinds of posts you’d prefer to see less of,” Bluesky’s blog post claims. If this turns out to be true, the Discover tab could finally fill a gap: in order to keep things fresh, there needs to be a decent place on Bluesky to encounter new kinds of content other than in reply threads. The chronological Following tab does, after all, get monotonous after a while (It basically inundates you with the posts of users you genuinely like, but who post a ton).
If dislike is a robust and effective function with the power to zap entire categories of things out of existence for the user, it could herald a whole new Bluesky: one in which the Discover tab is useful and maybe even dangerously addictive. But if dislike doesn’t go for the jugular, that’s fine. There’s always old, reliable block.
