Related papers: Paper Skygest: Personalized Academic Recommendatio…
Personalized recommendation algorithms deliver content to the user on most major social media platforms. While these algorithms are crucial for helping users find relevant content, users lack meaningful control over them. This reduces…
Social media users have repeatedly advocated for control over the currently opaque operations of feed algorithms. Large language models (LLMs) now offer the promise of custom-defined feeds--but users often fail to foresee the gaps and edge…
Bluesky is a new social network built upon the AT Protocol, a decentralized foundation for public social media. It was launched in private beta in February 2023, and has grown to over 10 million registered users by October 2024. In this…
Amid the migration of academics from X, the social media platform Bluesky has emerged as a potential alternative. To assess its viability and relevance for science communication, this study presents the first large-scale analysis of…
Social media feeds use predictive models to maximize engagement, often misaligning how people consume content with how they wish to. We introduce Bonsai, a system that enables people to build personalized and intentional feeds. Bonsai…
Bluesky is a nascent Twitter-like and decentralized social media network with novel features and unprecedented data access. This paper provides a characterization of its interaction network, studying the political leaning, polarization,…
Pollution of online social spaces caused by rampaging d/misinformation is a growing societal concern. However, recent decisions to reduce access to social media APIs are causing a shortage of publicly available, recent, social media data,…
Decentralized social media platforms like Bluesky Social (Bluesky) have made it possible to publicly disclose some user behaviors with millisecond-level precision. Embracing Bluesky's principles of open-source and open-data, we present the…
While almost everything that astronomers study occurs in the vacuum of space, astronomy itself does not `happen in a vacuum'. Interactions between scientists, as well as outreach to members of the public, improve extensively from access to…
Providing personalized recommendations that are also accompanied by explanations as to why an item is recommended is a research area of growing importance. At the same time, progress is limited by the availability of open evaluation…
Microblogging is a crucial mode of online communication. However, launching a new microblogging platform remains challenging, largely due to network effects. This has resulted in entrenched (and undesirable) dominance by established…
Algorithmic feeds have become primary environments for encountering information online, yet while they shape what people see, less is known about how sustained feed exposure shapes how people write. Drawing on Cultivation Theory, we examine…
The pitfalls of centralized social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter/X, have led to concerns about control, transparency, and accountability. Decentralized social networks have emerged as a result with the goal of empowering users.…
Social media plays a central role in shaping public opinion and behavior, yet performing experiments on these platforms and, in particular, on feed algorithms is becoming increasingly challenging. This guide offers practical recommendations…
Large-scale networks have been instrumental in shaping how we think about social systems, and have undergirded many foundational results in mathematical epidemiology, computational social science, and biology. However, many of the social…
Social media platforms mediate professional communication, political expression, and community formation, making the rare instances when users collectively abandon an incumbent platform particularly consequential. Strong network effects…
The accelerating pace of scientific publishing makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to stay current. We present Paper Espresso, an open-source platform that automatically discovers, summarizes, and analyzes trending arXiv papers.…
Modern web-based platforms show ranked lists of recommendations to users, attempting to maximise user satisfaction or business metrics. Typically, the goal of such systems boils down to maximising the exposure probability for items that are…
As scientific research proliferates, researchers face the daunting task of navigating and reading vast amounts of literature. Existing solutions, such as document QA, fail to provide personalized and up-to-date information efficiently. We…
Existing social media platforms (SMPs) make it incredibly difficult for researchers to conduct studies on social media, which in turn has created a knowledge gap between academia and industry about the effects of platform design on user…