I have been using @spacecowboy17.bsky.social's "For You" feed on Bluesky for a while. It is significantly better than Bluesky's default Discover feed - a lot of this is probably just because having to seek it out selects against Facebook expats who think posts in Discover are addressed directly to them and/or contain their activation phrase - but it does have the problems of pretty much any social media recommendation system. Namely, it seems to boost things that are angry, horny, or funny, the categories that lend themselves to significant engagement.

This is not a knock against "For You". The reason I'm on Bluesky and not Mastodon is that it actually surfaces interesting content. I want to see the viral jokes, get a general sense of the news, and be in the digital public square instead of a sleepy little server. I think that's what most people want out of social media. But I would really, really like some way to opt out of the parts of it that make me feel very bad: main characters, ratios, quote dunking, and "The Discourse". One thing I really like about Bluesky is that it offers a lot more meaningful ways to do this: interoperability along with user moderation lists and labels and granular block and mute settings go a long way. But there is still something missing - a way to opt out of the inevitable cycles of rage and backlash that happen on a semi-daily basis.

This was driven home today with The Atlantic's monthly-ish ragebait essay, an argument that a Cinnabon employee who got fired for being racist and went viral shouldn't have been. I will not link to it because it's stupid as hell but I would really like the option to not have known about this at all. I didn't before everyone online had to get their licks in and I do not feel richer for having learned of it. Despite muting the phrase "The Atlantic" and repeatedly hitting "show less like this" in my For You feed on anything related to it, I still cannot log into the website without being confronted with someone opining about this stupid fucking bait that no one needed to give air to.

As someone who has spent a fair bit of time inspecting the Bluesky firehose, Discourse and engagement bait are far from the majority of posts out there (admittedly more than you could possibly imagine is stuff so horny that it would kill a lesser man, but there are other things too). I believe there has to be some way to surface stuff that will, like, make me feel halfway decent or teach me something or just make me laugh. I am sure a significant of this is that recommender algorithms tend to clock me as a liberal arts-educated New York resident with a higher-than-average news diet but I would really like the option to be recommended different things. Rather than having to spend days, weeks, or months manually giving feedback on what I want to see and making healthy choices in what I like and repost, I would like a nuclear option to immediately adopt the algorithm I aspire to rather than the one I deserve.

I have seen this done by Sam Lavigne in the form of Other Orders, which allowed you to sort tweets by "Kafka-esqueness" and "Cop-Like", among others, but I'm not aware of more recent or Bluesky-centric forays into alternate sorting or recommendation methods other than Skywatch's "Discourse Bait", which I am subscribed to but seems not to have gotten the job done in this instance. Custom feeds are the part of Bluesky/atproto that I have touched the least in my explorations so far. So this is in part a request for links or references and in part a call to action. Is there research out there into recommender algorithms that make people happy? Or at the very least ones that can generally detect hot zones of manufactured oturage and silence them? Are there Bluesky feeds designed specifically to ignore Discourse? If not, can someone make one? If someone else has a good recommendation algorithm can I try theirs on?

I have sworn off side projects 'til after the holidays but I will take up this cause if no one else does in the meantime. Until then, if you see bait, please do not make me read about it. Thank you for your attention to this matter.