What Bluesky Got Right: Chronology

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — February 4, 2026

For more than a decade, major social media platforms insisted that algorithmic feeds were necessary. Without them, users were told, people would miss important content. Feeds would become chaotic. Engagement would collapse.

That claim was false.

What algorithmic feeds actually did was reshape human behavior. Outrage traveled faster than accuracy. Misrepresentation outperformed correction. Emotional escalation became more valuable than clarity. Over time, feeds stopped reflecting reality and started reflecting profit.

When Bluesky restored the chronological feed and made it the default experience, it quietly disproved years of Silicon Valley assumptions. The result was not chaos. The result was calmer behavior.

Algorithms Shape Behavior, Not Reality

Algorithmic ranking systems do not simply surface relevant content. They reward material that generates engagement: anger, fear, humiliation, and tribal signaling. Users adapt to those incentives whether they are conscious of it or not.

Posting behavior changes.
Reading habits shift.
Responses become sharper and more performative.

When outrage is rewarded, outrage becomes the dominant tone. When attention is scarce, extremity becomes currency. This is not a moral failure by users; it is the predictable outcome of design.

Chronological feeds remove that incentive structure. Posts appear because they were written, not because they provoked someone. Attention becomes something people choose to give, not something platforms extract.

Time Order Restores Proportion

In a chronological feed, not everything can be urgent. A bad take scrolls away. A minor argument fades naturally. Users are no longer forced to relive the same conflict for days because an algorithm decided it was “engaging.”

This restores proportion.

Not every disagreement becomes a pile-on.
Not every mistake becomes permanent.
Not every post needs to escalate to survive.

Time moves forward again. That sounds simple. It is not.

Incentives Changed, So Behavior Changed

On Bluesky, users quickly learned that shouting did not buy visibility. Neither did dunking, baiting, or exaggeration. What worked instead was consistency, clarity, and being worth following over time.

Conflict did not disappear. What disappeared was the incentive to manufacture it.

This mattered most for marginalized users, especially queer users, who have historically paid the highest price for algorithmic amplification. When harassment cannot be boosted, mobs lose momentum. When lies do not travel faster than corrections, reputational harm becomes harder to weaponize.

Chronology does not make people better.
It removes the system that trained them to be worse.

“Boring” Turned Out to Be Healthy

Critics often describe chronological feeds as boring. What they usually mean is that the feed no longer delivers constant adrenaline spikes. There are fewer dopamine hits. Less rage. Fewer viral moments engineered to keep users scrolling.

That boredom is not a flaw. It is recovery.

A healthy social environment does not feel like a slot machine. It feels like a room people can enter and leave without manipulation. Bluesky demonstrated that many users were not addicted to outrage; they were trapped by design.

The Lesson Other Platforms Refused to Learn

Nothing about chronological feeds is technically difficult. Every major platform could restore them tomorrow. They choose not to because outrage is profitable and calm is not.

By restoring time order, Bluesky demonstrated that the internet’s dysfunction was not inevitable. It was engineered — and therefore reversible.

That is why this design choice mattered.
And that is why it unsettled the industry.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

This essay will be archived as part of the ongoing WPS News Monthly Brief Series available through Amazon.

References (APA)

Tufekci, Z. (2018). YouTube, the great radicalizer. The New York Times.
Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018). Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. Oxford University Press.
Haidt, J., & Bail, C. (2023). Social media and political dysfunction. Science, 380(6642), 404–406.
Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the Internet. Yale University Press.