Revert new "sort replies by likes" feature

[bondjimbond]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The change to sort replies by likes instead of chronologically was introduced today (1.49). It was widely panned in the replies as being harmful to the user experience rather than an improvement.

Describe the solution you'd like

Revert this change and sort replies chronologically by default. Ideally, also add an option to sort replies by other criteria (likes, number of replies), but leave chronological the default.

Additional context

See the many replies to the announcement: https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3k6t3d3wkxv26

[Bossett]

There are three main concerns as I see it:

• Likes to be weaponised as we have seen on twitter, as a means of harassment (i.e. 'ratio')
• Large accounts now have a massive visibility advantage in replies, and will dominate conversations - even if they come late with the same reply, this will harm smaller accounts looking for visibility
• Threads will now be 'decided' early, and late replies are simply pointless for engagement. This is especially bad where there needs to be follow-up engagement (i.e. for clarification, etc.), but wild assumptions have been made early.

More minor:

• I am now discouraged from liking other things in the same thread if I want visibility
• I'm now encouraged to post bait, and cut out any nuance. And post fast - I could get a big boost if I'm the first on a thread with a hot take.
• Doing this in a preference will likely just mean the default behaviour becomes 'real', because it doesn't matter how I behave, it's how other people behave

But overall, I'm just not sure likes are a good proxy for healthy engagement.

+1 on reverting.

(But longer term preferencing/thread management is a +1 too - this could be optioned, or done per-thread in UI - there are positives to this change, but imo need to capture/protect them.)

[skunecuscre1]

Disagree on reverting it, just add more options (with most liked still being the default for new users).

Putting bangers at the top was one of the good things about Twitter before Elon messed it up with the bluecheck stuff.

[str4d]

Ideally, also add an option to sort replies by other criteria

This is already tracked in #1103.

[mschwendener]

The announcement just mentions "Thread replies" (and web), not replies to single posts.

Until now, replies to posts in a thread * were just added at the end of the thread. They may have been sorted chronologically, but the context of which post in the thread they were a reply to was not visible. Here I think sort by number of likes isn't worse than chronological sort, but it's not the solution, either.

Details in #1044.

• thread in the sense of: the original author chains together a series of posts.

[str4d]

leave chronological the default.

Chronological was not the previous default, which is what makes this somewhat confusing. It was a hybrid of chronological and reverse-chronological, with some additional logic. I wrote up what I believe to be the current default here:

• Original Poster's replies always first.
  • Within OP's replies, oldest-first.
• Remaining posts sorted in order of moderation score, lowest-first.
  • Within each moderation score band, most-liked-first. <-- this was added in 1.49
    • For posts with equal likes, newest-first.

[pfrazee]

I'm going to close this as a dup of #1103. If it looks like adding the option will take too long, we'll consider reverting.

[simonetthomas]

Threads will now be 'decided' early, and late replies are simply pointless for engagement. This is especially bad where there needs to be follow-up engagement (i.e. for clarification, etc.), but wild assumptions have been made early.

And post fast - I could get a big boost if I'm the first on a thread with a hot take.

@Bossett I don't see in what way a chronological order would be better about that... On the contrary, the first replies would be displayed first and couldn't even be replaced by "better" (more liked) ones

[bondjimbond]

@pfrazee Thanks for being open to the feedback.