Should readers be able to reorder a feed someone else built?
Say a feed has one account that posts very often, and its posts start most of the arguments in that feed. Some readers follow the feed for exactly that. Others have told the operator those posts wear them out. If the operator ranks those posts lower, the feed gets quieter and loses a lot of its discussion. If the operator leaves them where they are, the opposite happens. Both groups are readers of this feed, and the operator has to account for both.
There is no ordering that satisfies both. One group wants the arguments and the activity around them. The other wants to read the feed with those pushed down. The operator can only pick one ordering, and a reader who doesn’t like it has no option other than unfollowing the whole feed.
Why personalization doesn’t settle this
The obvious answer is to order the feed differently for each reader. Setting that up is a lot of work for one feed operator, but the deeper problem is what it would run on. Personalization infers what you want from what you did, and behavior doesn’t carry that information reliably.
A system sees that you opened a thread full of arguments. It can’t tell whether you enjoyed it or couldn’t believe it and wanted to see how bad it got. Either way it gives you more. And some things never show up in behavior at all: if you know you keep reading arguments and want to stop, nothing in your clicks says so. The system sees someone who reads a lot of arguments and keeps supplying them.
None of this is a problem if the reader just says what they want.
Where this sits in what Bluesky already offers
Bluesky already gives people two kinds of control, and they’re at different stages.
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What gets hidden from you. Moderation and labelers. Your settings can differ from everyone else’s, you pick which labelers to subscribe to, and what you choose doesn’t change what anyone else sees.
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How what you see is ordered. You pick between feeds. Follow one someone else made, build your own, or switch away if it doesn’t suit you. Bluesky’s own Discover feed has Show more / Show less, but that only works there. On a feed someone else built there is nothing of the kind.
Per person settings are already normal here for hiding. For ordering they don’t exist yet. That’s the part I want to work on.
What it does
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The operator’s feed is untouched. Which posts belong in the feed is still decided by the feed generator, and other readers see exactly what they saw before.
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A reader can add one layer that applies only to their own copy: posts with a given characteristic get moved up or down.
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Nothing is removed. A post you move down is still in your feed, just lower.
Seeing the effect before you apply it
Before an adjustment takes effect, two things are shown.
What it changes in your own feed. The interface shows what this specific adjustment does to the posts you would otherwise have seen. If you rank down posts that tend to start arguments, for example, it shows which accounts you will see less of as a result, since in some feeds a large share of those posts comes from a small number of accounts. A different adjustment gives you a different picture.
What this kind of reordering does to people. A fair amount of large scale experimental work exists on this, and the interface presents those results to the user. All of it was run on other platforms with different users, so how much applies to Bluesky is not certain.
The point of this half is that a reader makes the choice knowing what follows from it.
How this differs from two things that already exist
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Show more / Show less works only on Bluesky’s own feed, not on feeds other people built, and it tells you nothing about what your feedback will do.
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Attie takes a description of what you want and has an AI generate a new feed. Here the feed stays as its operator built it. Only the order you personally see it in changes.
Where I am
I have a prototype with the basics working: a couple of reranking options, applied to any feed you follow. What I don’t know is whether it’s useful, and how it would need to work to fit what people here need.
Questions
Answering any single one of these is useful.
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If you run a feed: has there been an ordering decision where some of your readers would be unhappy no matter what you chose? How did you handle it?
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If you run a feed: would you want readers changing the order they personally see from your feed, or would you rather it stay as you set it? Either way, I’d like to hear why.
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If you follow feeds: have you known you didn’t want more of something while a feed kept serving it? Did you do anything about it, or put up with it?
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If you follow feeds: do you actually change anything about the feeds you use, or do you stay with the defaults? If you stay with the defaults, is that because you’re happy with them, because it’s not worth the effort, or because you hadn’t thought about it?
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If you build tools here: has anything like this been tried? Point me to tools, datasets, discussion groups, or older threads.
I’ll gather the responses, write them up, and post the summary back to this thread. Anything I build will be open source.
I’m Yubo Zhou, a graduate student at the University of Michigan. This is part of a research project with my advisor, Professor Ceren Budak, on how feed ranking affects people. The project will produce open source tools along with the research itself. What people say here will decide whether I take this further and what I change. If it does go further and I want to do proper interviews or a study, I’ll reach out separately rather than treat this thread as one.