Bluesky now displays replies by 'hotness'

Not everyone is happy about it being the default.

Bluesky replies will now default to appear by "hotness" in a contentious update to the social media platform.

Announced this week as part of the app's 1.95 software update, post replies will now appear as "hot replies first", which is the new default setting. "With this release, you can now display replies by “hotness,” which weights liked replies that are more recent more heavily," the app's official Bluesky account posted.

📢 1.95 is rolling out now (2/6) With this release, you can now display replies by “hotness,” which weights liked replies that are more recent more heavily.

[image or embed]
— Bluesky (@bsky.app) November 27, 2024 at 9:10 PM

Post reply settings also include sorting by oldest or newest replies, most liked, or a random setting labelled "Poster's roulette".

But while Bluesky's announcement was delivered with excitement, a lot of users aren't happy with the addition, especially as it's now the default setting. Users protested the act of rewarding "clout farmers" and lamented this similarity to platforms like X — where many Bluesky users have fled from.

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"Prioritising 'popular' like this is one of the main reasons all the other social media sites became awful and encourages shitty behaviour," wrote Phonogram author and illustrator Jamie McKelvie.

Making "hotness" the default is a terrible change. Let's not speed run to be X or FB, okay?
— Marc Ruvolo (@marcruvolo.bsky.social) November 28, 2024 at 10:12 PM

Most recent replied has always been the best system. It ensures that everyone's opinion gets views. popular just means whoever shouts loudest & quickest starts at the top & more eloquent or valid posts get pushed down to the bottom. May as well cut off replied after the first 20
— Stu (@galaxy4t2.bsky.social) November 29, 2024 at 11:33 AM

Yeah, unless it can train up on relevance, uniqueness of engagement and sound logic a post attracts, it will roll this right into those problems of amplification and clout. All the same behaviors and bots will come right along. Brand new here but I could see it happening very fast.
— Jenn Hartt (@2aspirin.bsky.social) November 29, 2024 at 3:19 AM

If you want to change your default setting from "hot replies first," you can switch the setting within Thread Preferences — go to Settings, then Content and Media, then Thread Preferences.

Bluesky's Thread Preferences showing "Hot replies first"

Credit: Shannon Connellan / Mashable screenshot

Bluesky is experiencing more growing pains than reply mechanics, despite recently passing the 20 million-user mark. Reports of a million public Bluesky posts being scraped to train AI haven't been ideal optics for the alternative to Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) and Meta's Threads. However, engagement on the platform has already been celebrated as feeling better than X, especially due to its customisable algorithm model, opt-in Feed types, and growing stan support.

Mashable's Chris Taylor dug into just what Bluesky can learn from its competitors, for better or worse.

UPDATE: Dec. 3, 2024, 11:15 a.m. GMT This article has been updated to clarify that Bluesky itself did not scrape posts for AI training — as reported by 404Media on Nov. 26, the posts were crawled and then uploaded to AI company Hugging Face.

Topics Social Media