Meta’s brief release of its social AI chatbots highlighted the challenges of studying systems that are both short-lived and relationally complex. In response, we conducted a 10-day collaborative autoethnography to rapidly and meaningfully engage with the product. As the first application of this method to social AI chatbots, our study demonstrates its value for examining ephemeral and emotionally complex AI systems.

In Wikipedia, conflict plays a vital role in refining knowledge. Yet some disputes persist without clear resolution or rule violations, resulting in long, circular discussions without moderator intervention. These deter neutral and third-party editors and often end only when one side gives up. In such cases, what is needed is not moderation but mediation-support that helps participants voice perspectives and reach consensus. However, mediation is hard to implement manually, as it requires summarizing complex discussions with a full grasp of both content and the Wikipedia community's culture. One potential solution is delegating this task to AI-but what content should be included in summaries that mediate and facilitate disagreements? Through a three-phase interview study with 14 Wikipedians, we examined how they read and interpret discussions, create their own summaries, and evaluate large language model (LLM)-generated summaries presented as technology probes. Our findings show that Wikipedians expect summaries to include key discussion elements-usernames, topics, arguments, sources, editor behavior, rule violations, and resolution-with particular emphasis on community-related context that reflects insider understanding. Based on these insights, we apply a new theoretical framework grounded in computer-mediated communication (CMC) theories such as common ground theory, warranting theory, and social presence theory to examine Wikipedians' interpretations of user identity. We also discuss design implications for discussion summaries on Wikipedia talk pages.

Through co-design interviews (N=19) and a design evaluation survey (N=136) with U.S. teens ages 13-18, we investigated teens' privacy management on social media. Our study revealed that 28.1% of teens with public accounts and 15.3% with private accounts experience dysfunctional fear, that is, fear that diminishes their quality of life or paralyzes them from taking necessary precautions. These fears fall into three categories: fear of uncontrolled audience reach, fear of online hostility, and fear of personal privacy missteps. While current approaches often emphasize individual vigilance and restrictive measures, our findings show this can paradoxically lead teens to either withdraw from beneficial social interactions or resign themselves to accept privacy violations, viewing them as inevitable. Drawing on teen input, we developed and evaluated ten design prototypes that emphasize empowerment over fear, system-wide explicit emphasis on privacy, clear privacy norms, and flexible controls. Survey results indicate teens perceive these approaches as effectively reducing privacy concerns while preserving social benefits. Our findings suggest that platforms will be more likely to protect teens' privacy and less likely to manufacture unnecessary fear if they include designs that minimize the impact on other users, have low trade-offs with existing features, require minimal user effort, and function independently of community behavior. Such designs include: 1) alerting users about potentially unintentional personal information disclosure and 2) following up on user reports.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, video conferencing platforms have given rise to new virtual activities, such as virtual study rooms where users utilize video to share ambient presence for study motivation. In virtual study rooms, it can be challenging for the users to determine what to reveal and what to hide on camera, as the video needs to strongly convey their presence without revealing more than necessary. In this paper, we investigate the conflicting needs of virtual study room users to reveal and hide on camera, as well as the methods they employ to cope with these needs using videos. To this end, we conducted a three-step qualitative study. The first study involved interviews to discover the key user needs that entail the conflict to reveal and hide. The second study utilized virtual study room screen analysis to identify the video features that characterize virtual study room videos. In the last study, we employed interviews to associate the video features with the key user needs. Based on these findings, we discussed the effects of studying together that could be applied to a non-physical and non-interactive co-studying environment and the need for further development of video conferencing tools to effectively share ambient presence.