In the attention economy, online platforms are incentivized to design products that maximize user engagement, even when such practices conflict with users' best interests. We conducted a structured content analysis of all Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) to identify the designs these influential apps and sites use to capture attention and extend engagement. Specifically, we conducted this analysis posing as a teenager to identify the designs that young people are exposed to. We find that VLOPs use four strategies to extend teens' use: pressuring, enticing, trapping, and lulling them into spending more time online. We report on a hierarchical taxonomy organizing the 63 designs that fall under these categories. Applying this taxonomy to all 17 VLOPs, we identify 583 instances of engagement-prolonging designs, with social media platforms using twice as many as other VLOPs. We present three vignettes illustrating how these designs reinforce one another in practice. We further contribute a graphical dataset of videos illustrating these features in the wild.
Short-form video platforms (SVSPs) have rapidly evolved from entertainment applications to essential digital infrastructures in rural areas. As such, they are reshaping how farmers organize production and manage everyday activities. However, little is known about how this transformation impacts agricultural practices directly.
To explore this, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 farmers engaged in crop, livestock, and aquaculture production. Our findings reveal that farmers perceive SVSPs as infrastructural supports across various farming stages—planning, establishment, protection, and sales—by providing timely access to market opportunities, practical knowledge, and peer networks. However, reliance on SVSPs also introduces challenges, including fragmented and unreliable content, issues of contextual relevance, and tensions between platform dynamics and farming practices.
This study contributes to understanding how emerging media infrastructures, like SVSPs, reshape rural production. We also offer design recommendations for building more context-aware, resilient, and inclusive digital support systems for agriculture.
The growing use of AI in public administration improves efficiency, yet its use in discretionary decisions raises concerns about fairness and legitimacy. While prior research examined decision stakes and Human–AI decision-making configurations separately, their combined effect on citizens’ perceptions of fairness and adoption remains underexplored. We conducted a mixed-method Wizard-of-Oz study (n=43) using an Intelligent-Self-Service-Kiosk. Participants completed a low-stakes (ID renewal) and a high-stakes (social housing) task under one of three decision-making configurations: AI alone, AI with human supervision, and human with AI advice or recommendation. Quantitative analysis found no significant effects, highlighting the limits of standard metrics. However, qualitative interviews revealed that citizens valued human involvement, requiring meaningful over symbolic oversight. They emphasized interactive dialogue before decisions to capture their circumstances and after, to facilitate appeals. We contribute evidence of tensions between citizens’ desire for efficiency and need for human-control and fairness. We provide guidance for designing citizen-centered AI systems that align with democratic values.
Local information is essential for civic engagement, community belonging and well-being, and collective action. As more U.S. communities become "news deserts" without local newspapers or broadcast media, neighborhood- and municipality-level groups on platforms like Facebook, Nextdoor, and Reddit have become key nodes in local information infrastructure. This paper examines how volunteer moderators of these local online groups contribute to sustaining local information infrastructure, focusing on how they understand their groups’ informational function, the roles they assume to realize this function, and the skills they mobilize to fulfill perceived roles. Drawing on an Asynchronous Remote Community study and in-depth interviews with U.S.-based moderators, we conceptualize local volunteer moderation as situated civic labor, emphasizing the interpretive, relational, and context-contingent nature of their work. We offer design implications for platforms to support local knowledge and discretion and sustain democratic practices to strengthen the civic potential of online spaces to serve their local communities.
Online fashion shopping is booming, yet high return rates persist as actual size and fit do not meet shoppers' expectations. Virtual Try-On (VTON), rendering garments on individuals’ body images, promises to reduce such issues. To understand VTON’s impact on shopping behaviors and experiences, we conducted user study with 24 participants where they were asked to explore and purchase clothing online and then shared their thoughts on satisfaction, similarity, and return intentions after wearing items. Results show that VTON reduced exploration time and product detail views, while enabling clearer expectations of fit before delivery.
Importantly, participants often used VTON for final verification, while some sought to discover new styles, suggesting VTON should provide adaptive support according to users’ tendencies.
Participants also emphasized fit accuracy, highlighting the need for technical improvements and reliability cues such as confidence scores. Building on these findings, we suggest design implications for integrating VTON into e-commerce.
This paper examines how non-resident Bangladeshis mobilized during the 2024 quota-reform turned pro-democracy movement, leveraging social platforms and remittance flows to challenge state authority. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we identify four phases of their collective action: technology-mediated shifts to active engagement, rapid transnational network building, strategic execution of remittance boycott, reframing economic dependence as political leverage, and adaptive responses to government surveillance and information blackouts. We extend postcolonial computing by introducing the idea of "diasporic superposition," which shows how diasporas can exercise political and economic influence from hybrid positionalities that contest and complicate power asymmetries. We reframe diaspora engagement by highlighting how migrants participate in and reshape homeland politics, beyond narratives of integration in host countries. We advance the scholarship on financial technologies by foregrounding their relationship with moral economies of care, state surveillance, regulatory constraints, and uneven international economic power dynamics. Together, these contributions theorize how transnational activism and digital technologies intersect to mobilize political change in Global South.
Wikipedia administrators are vital to the project's success, performing over a million administrative actions annually. This multi-method study
systematically analyzes adminship across 284 Wikipedia languages since 2018, revealing a critical two-sided trend: while over half of all Wikipedias show a net increase in administrators, almost two-thirds of highly active Wikipedias face decline. Our analysis, drawing from large-scale adminship log analysis, over 3000 surveys, and 12 interviews, reveals this decline is primarily driven by insufficient recruitment, not unusual attrition. We identify key barriers for potential administrators: limited awareness, ambiguous requirements, a demanding selection process, and low initial interest. Recognizing that current administrators remain highly motivated and engaged, we propose actionable recommendations to strengthen recruitment pipelines and fuel Wikipedia administrator growth, crucial for Wikipedia's long-term sustainability.