Skip to main content

Bluesky experiments with dislikes and 'social proximity' to improve conversations

By

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 you’d 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 doesn’t “want to make that the only option.” 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 it’ll 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://ift.tt/F81frwK

from Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics https://ift.tt/F81frwK
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Nintendo Switch has been the US’s bestselling console for 23 straight months

By
Photo by James Bareham / The Verge It’s been a good two years for the Nintendo Switch. According to Nintendo, the gaming tablet has been the bestselling console in the US for 23 straight months. And according to data from the NPD Group, it just had its best October ever, moving 735,926 units of both the Switch and Switch Lite in the US. The company says that represents a 136 percent increase compared to last year. To date, the Switch has sold 22.5 million units in the US, and last week Nintendo revealed that more than 68 million units have been sold globally . “We’re excited about our momentum,” says Nick Chavez, Nintendo of America’s SVP of sales and marketing. Chavez puts the company’s big October down to two main factors. One is a better supply of stock; this year in particular, it’s often been hard to find a Switch on store shelves. This has only been exacerbated by increased demand due to a combination of the pandemic and the breakout success of Animal Crossing: New Horizons . ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Instagram accidentally reinstated Pornhub’s banned account

By
After years of on-and-off temporary suspensions, Instagram permanently banned Pornhub’s account in September. Then, for a short period of time this weekend, the account was reinstated. By Tuesday, it was permanently banned again. “This was done in error,” an Instagram spokesperson told TechCrunch. “As we’ve said previously, we permanently disabled this Instagram account for repeatedly violating our policies.” Instagram’s content guidelines prohibit  nudity and sexual solicitation . A Pornhub spokesperson told TechCrunch, though, that they believe the adult streaming platform’s account did not violate any guidelines. Instagram has not commented on the exact reasoning for the ban, or which policies the account violated. It’s worrying from a moderation perspective if a permanently banned Instagram account can accidentally get switched back on. Pornhub told TechCrunch that its account even received a notice from Instagram, stating that its ban had been a mistake (that message itse...
Post a Comment
Read more

MVP versus EVP: Is it time to introduce ethics into the agile startup model?

By
Anand Rao Contributor Share on Twitter Anand Rao is global head of AI at PwC . The rocket ship trajectory of a startup is well known: Get an idea, build a team and slap together a minimum viable product (MVP) that you can get in front of users. However, today’s startups need to reconsider the MVP model as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) become ubiquitous in tech products and the market grows increasingly conscious of the ethical implications of AI augmenting or replacing humans in the decision-making process. An MVP allows you to collect critical feedback from your target market that then informs the minimum development required to launch a product — creating a powerful feedback loop that drives today’s customer-led business. This lean, agile model has been extremely successful over the past two decades — launching thousands of successful startups, some of which have grown into billion-dollar companies. However, building high-performing product...
Post a Comment
Read more