While users can choose to abandon technologies, there is a need to better understand why and how they negotiate continued use, especially when persistence can be psychologically costly. As growing evidence suggests that dating app users persist despite negative impacts to their mental health and well-being, we explore the digital dating context as a rich site to explicate the process of “staying.” Drawing on interviews with 15 dating app users, we provide an empirical account of staying that illustrates how affective and adaptive dynamics work together to sustain cyclical engagement. We find that oscillating affective patterns shape how users interpret and re-enter dating app use over time while three clusters of adaptive practices help regulate participation and manage these affective patterns. We then unpack our findings through cruel optimism, foreground hope as a key affective experience, and argue that design alone is insufficient to address the structural conditions of staying.

The effects of social media platform usage on users' well-being have been a topic of significant discussion. Some evidence suggests that users sharing about themselves in ways that are perceived by themselves and others as ''authentic'' may benefit their well-being. BeReal is a social media platform that aims to encourage more authentic online behavior by constraining users' ability to selectively share content via a daily prompt to post whatever they are doing at that time. This rigid operationalization of authenticity, however, may be at odds with the rich and nuanced notions of authenticity observed in practice. Through an analysis of interviews with 25 BeReal users, we find that participants experienced two facets of authenticity that often did not align with BeReal's operationalization. Moreover, we find that participants' desire for authenticity was often in tension with their competing desires for privacy and autonomy, and their desire to reflect back on significant moments. We discuss how these tensions illustrate the challenges of designing for authenticity and add nuance to our understanding of authenticity on social media platforms.

Despite efforts to raise awareness of societal and ethical issues in CS education, research shows students often do not act upon their new awareness (Problem 1). One such issue, well-established by HCI research, is that much of technology contains barriers impacting numerous populations—such as minoritized genders, races, ethnicities, and more. HCI has inclusive design methods that help—but these skills are rarely taught, even in HCI classes (Problem 2). To address Problems 1 and 2, we created the Matchmaker Curriculum to pair CS faculty—including non-HCI faculty—with inclusive design elements to allow for inclusive design skill-building throughout their CS program. We present the curriculum and a field study, in which we followed 18 faculty along their journey. The results show how the Matchmaker Curriculum equipped 88% of these faculty with enough inclusive design teaching knowledge to successfully embed actionable inclusive design skill-building into 13 CS courses.