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Bluesky experiments with dislikes and 'social proximity' to improve conversations
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
37 points (89.4% liked)
Technology
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I don't know, I could see that improving the experience.
It always starts that way. But the tighter reliance on their control only leads one place.
I'm not here to tell you that their motives are pure. But I don't see how a dislike button or social proximity are enshittification. And I don't see how it's tighter reliance on their control.
Is Lemmy having the ability to downvote enshittification? That's what drew me to Reddit and now to Lemmy. It pushes less useful/interesting content down and brings better content to the front (generally)
Is showing you posts from people connected to people connected to you enshittification? That's a feature I genuinely like about LinkedIn. I've seen posts from people I know but wasn't connected to yet. I've seen pictures from events I attended but uploaded but people I don't know personally.
Did you read it? They're building an algorithm to control what you see.
Happy cake day.
I did read it. Here's the company post that the article references and links to.
The social proximity thing is about replies to posts. Since replies are often a mix of people I follow and people I don't, I think it could be helpful to prioritize replies from people who are connected to those I already follow.
They say the dislike button will apply to "Discover and other feeds" which is a little less relevant to me because I don't use discover. Maybe I'd check it out more if it was better.
It would still be important to me that I have my unfiltered feed of posts by everyone I follow in chronological order. The post by Bluesky doesn't indicate they're changing that.
Even so, if they were actually altering that feed, my understanding is that you can switch to a different front end which uses whatever ordering/display logic you prefer. Catch of course being someone has to have created and maintained such a front end, and many people will just stick with the default option.
This
They are not focusing on making it easier for more people to run alternate nodes/indexers
They are focusing on enshittification
It is what they want - for them it is a "feature" to exist surely inside of their echo chambers. MANY Lemmy instances - hexbear.net and Lemmy.ml to name just a couple - are the same, banning people who even remotely disagree with them.
Profit-seeking is not the only cause of enshittification.