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Open-source X alternative Bluesky is set to introduce a “dislike” option for the first time, after hitting the 40 million user landmark earlier this week.
Bluesky says the new feature will work as a feedback signal to improve personalization in users’ feeds and help the system understand what kinds of posts you don't want to see. The platform says dislikes may also “lightly” inform reply ranking, reducing the visibility of low-quality replies.
Dislikes will be private and will mainly impact others in your “social neighborhood” rather than all users across the network globally. Bluesky says it’s working on a way to map these so-called “social neighborhoods” that naturally form on the platform, which means the people you already interact with or those that it thinks you’d likely enjoy knowing.
“By prioritizing replies from people closer to your neighborhood, we can make conversations feel more relevant, familiar, and less prone to misunderstandings,” the platform says.
The dislike button is not yet fully launched, and Bluesky didn’t provide a timeline for the rollout.
Plenty of other social networks have experimented with dislike buttons in recent years, with mostly mixed results. Facebook tested a comparable dislike button in 2015 and 2018, which would only contribute to the rankings of replies on public Facebook pages and wouldn’t apply to private posts from friends, but ultimately didn’t choose to keep the feature. At the time, Facebook said it would reduce spam and abusive comments on the platform.
X experimented with a dislike button in June 2024, which would also help rank responses to posts, but didn’t also end up persisting with the feature. Many users expressed concerns about how it could be used for online bullying and harassment, or for organized targeting by bad actors, similar to the practice of “review bombing” on sites like Amazon or Google Reviews.
TikTok, however, introduced a dislike button in September 2022, again with the goal of helping filter out abusive and spam comments, and it’s still in use. Meanwhile Reddit's downvote feature, which has been in use since its inception, forms a key part of the platform and how it works.
The changes to Bluesky's platform come as its user base has more than doubled over the past year, after exploding 519% in the first 10 months of 2024, amid widespread backlash to Elon Musk's ownership of X and his backing of President Trump.