Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
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Title: Bluesky experiments with dislikes and 'social proximity' to improve
conversations

Link: https://www.engadget.com/social-media/bluesky...

Bluesky is adding a dislike button as a way to signal the kind of posts you
don't want to see in your Discover feed. The experiment is part of several
new ideas Bluesky is exploring to a improve conversations on its platform.

The new experiments Bluesky is running are primarily built around the notion
of "social proximity." The company says it's aiming to build a system that
maps your place in a "social neighborhood" of "people you already interact
with or would likely enjoy knowing." By prioritizing replies and posts from
the people in your general "neighborhood," the company believes it can make
conversations "feel more relevant, familiar, and less prone to
misunderstandings." Following that logic, the beta test of the dislike button
(which sounds private, rather than public-facing) will "help the system
understand what kinds of posts youΓÇÖd prefer to see less of," but could also
affect reply rankings in your threads and in the threads of other people in
your social neighborhood.

The social platform already offers a way to limit replies to only people who
follow you, as Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee noted in a recent post, but the
company doesnΓÇÖt ΓÇ£want to make that the only option.ΓÇ¥ Bluesky is also
experimenting with adjusting how the Reply button works by making you see the
whole thread first when you tap the button, rather than dumping straight into
a new blank post. Combined with a new model for detecting bad replies, the
company thinks itΓÇÖll improve the general social climate.

Charitably, these tweaks sound like another way Bluesky is trying to give
users more control over what they see on the platform, in the same way it
does with things like notifications. Less charitably, you could read the
"social neighborhood" concept as a way to entrench users in their "filter
bubble" rather than address larger moderation issues.

Recently, Bluesky has been criticized by users for failing to remove the
accounts of people who allegedly violate the company's community guidelines.
Ensconced in a social neighborhood, those critics wouldn't necessarily see
offensive posts, nor would a poster see their critics. That might lead to
less conflict overall, but it could also impact more productive forms of
disagreement in the process.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/social-media/bluesky...
social-proximity-to-improve-conversations-205226194.html?src=rss

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