37
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
4525 readers
343 users here now
Which posts fit here?
Anything that is at least tangentially connected to the technology, social media platforms, informational technologies and tech policy.
Post guidelines
[Opinion] prefix
Opinion (op-ed) articles must use [Opinion] prefix before the title.
Rules
1. English only
Title and associated content has to be in English.
2. Use original link
Post URL should be the original link to the article (even if paywalled) and archived copies left in the body. It allows avoiding duplicate posts when cross-posting.
3. Respectful communication
All communication has to be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.
4. Inclusivity
Everyone is welcome here regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
5. Ad hominem attacks
Any kind of personal attacks are expressly forbidden. If you can't argue your position without attacking a person's character, you already lost the argument.
6. Off-topic tangents
Stay on topic. Keep it relevant.
7. Instance rules may apply
If something is not covered by community rules, but are against lemmy.zip instance rules, they will be enforced.
Companion communities
!globalnews@lemmy.zip
!interestingshare@lemmy.zip
Icon attribution | Banner attribution
If someone is interested in moderating this community, message @brikox@lemmy.zip.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.