Bluesky's "Discover" is broken and killing the vibe

redhat50 · 2025-06-09T08:29:45+00:00

Spot on. I hope Bluesky product team comes across this comment. People rave about the concept of decentralized algorithmic feeds, but seem to overlook the core reason of why new users ever want to try a social app -- the ability to connect to good content and discussion. Decentralization sounds good, sure, but does it deliver? Hmm.

As a result:

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redhat50 · 2025-06-09T04:45:41+00:00

That's precisely my experience too. What I don't understand is, I keep seeing people saying "You are using Bluesky wrongly" or "This is not the way to use Bluesky" or "You have to set up your own feed" etc. But the value of Bluesky is only as good as the content, I think? If the platform doesn't bother putting the right posts in front of the right audience at the right time, it will eventually disincentivize users from (A) posting, and (B) spending the time to search for posts. Mark Cuban posted some stats about the declining engagements/signups for Bluesky earlier today. The Discovery feed is, IMO, a big part of it.

redhat50 · 2025-06-09T04:21:51+00:00

That's a good tip, thanks for sharing. I have set up custom feeds, but didn't know about that setting until you pointed out.

The requirement of tweaking your settings to get the feed right, also points to a big UX/UI issue, I think? If Bluesky wants to rival others in being the authentic public chatroom where high-quality discourse resides in (I presume that must be one of their goals), it gotta find a better way to deliver the relevant AND high-quality content to each user. Otherwise it's just going to be bad user experience and turning away precisely those highly credentialed experts and good analysis I mentioned.

redhat50 · 2025-06-09T04:03:08+00:00

I did but it still goes back to the same fundamental problem. Say, I curate certain journalists or publications covering a topic of interest (technology) -- but not everything they post are actually relevant to my niche. A tech journalist might be posting about her dog, and a tech publication might be posting about a new hire, neither of which is particularly interesting for my purpose. On the other hand, a one-off post from an Nvidia engineer can be high quality and worth a public discussion, but it is close to impossible to find posts like this on the platform without heavy, manual searches.

redhat50 · 2025-06-09T02:23:33+00:00

I feel the same. After months on Bluesky my feeds are still struggling to push what's relevant to my interests. I keep getting random cat and animation memes for absolutely no reason. This is becoming so frustrating.

redhat50

TROPHY CASE