On digital media services, uncivil commenting is a persistent issue causing negative emotional reactions. One enabler for such problematic behavior is the user interface, conditioning, and structuring text-based communication online. However, the specific roles and influences of UIs are little understood, which calls for critical analysis of the current UI solutions as well as speculative exploration of alternative designs. This paper reports a research-through-design study on the problematic phenomenon regarding uncivil and inconsiderate commenting on online news, envisioning unconventional solutions with a critical voice. We unpack this problem area and outline critical perspectives to possible solutions by describing and analyzing four designs that propose to support emotion regulation by facilitating self-reflection. The design choices are further discussed in respect to interviews of ten news media experts. The findings are reflected against the question of how can critique meaningfully manifest in this challenging problem area.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445783
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)