Teenagers are avid users of Discord, a fast-growing platform for synchronous communication where they often interact with strangers. Because Discord combines private DMs, semi-private voice channels, and public servers in one place, it creates a hybrid environment that can produce complex—and underexplored—safety risks for teenagers. Drawing on 16 interviews with teenage Discord users, this study examines their strategies for navigating risky social interactions in the platform. Our findings reveal that when teenagers encounter risks during social interactions, they exercise vigilance by evaluating suspicious interactions before forming friendships, using safety tools, and engaging in controlled risk-taking to safeguard their privacy and security. At the community level, they mitigate risks through selective participation in servers, a practice supported by vigilant governance structures. We discuss how vigilance enables teenagers to act during risky encounters to protect themselves, advancing understanding of teenagers’ agency in risk navigation and informing teen-centered designs for safer online environments.

With the development of consumer surveillance technologies, monitoring has become increasingly accessible and woven into family life. Prior work has examined parents’ attitudes, privacy concerns, and selected uses of surveillance technologies like smart cameras and location-tracking apps, but offers limited accounts of how parents, as surveillants, configure and experience these technologies themselves in daily parenting. We address this gap by focusing on baby monitoring technologies (BMTs) as a high-salience context during a sensitive stage of family life. Using inductive thematic analysis of Reddit discussions, we examine how parents engage with BMTs in practice. Our findings revealed how parents actively assemble and configure BMTs, navigate and manage their emotions through them, negotiate privacy frictions and boundaries, and safeguard security in their use of such technologies within parenting and caregiving. We conclude by discussing implications for surveillance research and design for monitoring technologies in care.

Gaming is a meaningful part of children’s lives, yet its safety has drawn increasing concerns from scholars and the public. On platforms like Roblox, children may encounter extremist roleplay, scams, or virtual rape. Prior research has emphasized technical interventions that address risks after they occur and ethical frameworks for game design, but children’s perspectives on safety design remain missing. To address this gap, we conducted a cooperative inquiry study to co-design safety mechanisms with 22 children aged 7–12. Children proposed designs emphasizing transparent information about games and purchases, community accountability through reporting and reviews, player empowerment to manage social boundaries and engagement, and age-appropriate game navigation. Our findings extend safety-by-design research by foregrounding children’s perspectives, showing how they envision safety mechanisms across both game and platform design, while enjoying safe play through risk exposure, allocating trust, and balancing platform support with agency.

Abstract The smooth functioning of the gig economy relies on gig workers’ local execution of tasks assigned by global platforms like Uber. Within this broader workforce, gig drivers (e.g., rideshare and delivery workers) draw on their local knowledge – information and skills specific to a particular region – to navigate and optimize routes. Building on a substantial body of research on gig work, this study turns attention to how gig drivers develop and deploy knowledge practices within the gig economy infrastructure. To address this, we analyzed 25 semi-structured interviews, revealing how drivers’ knowledge practices enable them to adapt platform systems to local conditions, develop algorithmic-local knowledge by integrating insights about platform behavior and market dynamics, and strategically regulate knowledge exchange with peers. We discuss how such knowledge practices play a critical role in localizing platform work, bridging the gaps between gig platforms’ global standards and local conditions.

Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) researchers have studied how teenagers experience safety risks such as cyberbullying and scam, but little attention has been paid to gambling. While teenagers’ access to traditional gambling, such as casinos, has been tightly regulated, internet technology has given rise to emergent forms of online gambling, which increasingly permeate teenagers’ everyday lives and exposes them to safety threats and gambling-related harm. Addressing this issue requires a deeper understanding of teenagers' risk perception of gambling, as it not only shapes individual decision-making but also influences societal behaviors and informs policies aimed at mitigating its harmful effects. To understand how teenagers perceive and deal with gambling risks, we analyzed how teenagers engaged in collective sensemaking of gambling in the r/teenagers subreddit, one of the largest online communities on Reddit for teenagers. Our findings revealed various gambling risks perceived by teenagers, the strategies they adopt to mitigate them, and the strong sense of agency they demonstrate in engaging with gambling-related content. Based on these findings, we propose gambling intervention recommendations targeting teenagers, as well as implications for platforms and policymaking.

User-generated game (UGG) platforms such as Roblox have become increasingly popular among children but are also criticized for hosting rampant online risks, such as virtual gang rape and spread of extremist ideologies. However, limited research has explored the risks from child players’ perspectives. Through an interview study with 26 child players, we found three categories of risks: varied scams, the normalization of anti-social behaviors, and adult roleplays. We also identified three types of safety practices child players employed on UGG platforms: adaptive safety practices across different social relationships, applying heuristics to safeguard their safety, and tinkering with safety features. We discuss design-mediated risks in UGGs targeting vulnerable child players and challenges and opportunities for risk mitigation strategies in UGGs. Lastly, we provide design implications for UGG platforms to support child players and provide a safe place for them to play.

User-generated game (UGG) platforms like Roblox are enormously popular among children but are increasingly scrutinized for safety risks, such as gambling-like gameplay features and disturbing game themes such as slavery and Nazi roleplay. Researchers have started to examine harms in UGGs, but little attention has been paid to how game creators themselves consider child safety in their game making practices. To answer this question, we conducted an interview study with 20 Roblox creators with varied degrees of success. We found that our interviewees observed several types of risks to child players’ safety in their games, such as child-specific deceptive design, gambling-like gameplay, sexual abuse, and scamming. They further reasoned about major causes of these safety risks, such as Roblox's profit-driven monetization model, and leaving the burden of moderation to individual game creators. We discuss implications for platform governance on UGG platforms as well as policymaking.

Personally identifiable information (PII) is a fundamental concept in privacy research and regulations. Understanding users' perspectives on PII is critical, as their understanding of PII can significantly affect their privacy decisions and practices. While much research has explored users’ privacy perceptions and disclosure preferences regarding PII, less attention has been focused on how users internally define and conceptualize PII. In this study, we conducted interviews with 32 participants to investigate their conceptualization and understanding of PII, using period and fertility tracking apps as the context. Our findings reveal how users perceive the processes and contexts through which personal information, by becoming identifiable, transitions into PII, as well as concerns about data sharing and misuse in these apps. We conclude by advocating for addressing the misalignment between users' perceptions of PII and the regulatory protections and privacy designs surrounding it.

Abstract Video games have been a unique study context for computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) researchers for decades. However, despite their collaborative richness, CSCW has not yet developed a systematic understanding of video games as a site for studying cooperation and social interaction—limiting its ability to engage with the increasingly social, digital, and playful nature of work. Particularly, what are the academic characteristics of video game studies? What topics are studied in the context of video games? And what are the unique facets of the video game context? To answer these questions, we conducted a systematic literature review by analyzing 67 studies of video games published in CSCW outlets between 1998 and 2023. We describe these studies’ academic characteristics and the topics studied in the context of video games through seven themes. We further identify six unique facets of collaborative work that scholars gain through game studies. We conclude that video games not only serve as an empirically rich site for examining and enriching existing CSCW theories and frameworks, but also constitute unique and oftentimes novel sociotechnical configurations that recontextualize CSCW. We further point to gaps, opportunities, and future directions for CSCW researchers interested in exploring the diverse social and collaborative dynamics in games, thus contributing to a more inclusive and expansive understanding of collaboration in digitally mediated environments.

Women’s participation in competitive gaming continues to grow. Despite growing attention to women’s presence and challenges in gaming, research has largely overlooked their unique experiences with toxicity in competitive environments. Our study addresses this gap by examining the perspectives of 28 women who play competitive games at varying levels. Through reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews, we discovered how women are being harmed by gendered toxicity and desire for justice. We present two key findings: 1) the forms of gendered toxicity women perceive in competitive gaming and 2) how women respond to their experiences with gendered toxicity. Using women-centered perspectives, our research deepens the understanding of how gendered toxicity marginalizes women and highlights confrontational strategies that seek justice and drive change. We demonstrate that gendered toxicity sustains a sexist meritocracy and exposes the limitations of existing interventions and mitigation strategies. Our findings encourage game developers and industry practitioners to design more inclusive moderation systems and competitive gaming events.

Fake games are an emerging form of games characterized by misleading advertising (external referent) and perceived inauthenticity in gameplay (internal referent). While previous research has examined game authenticity, deceptive advertising, and game design, there is a lack of understanding about why players engage with fake games despite their deceptive nature and how they cope with the fakeness of these games. To address these questions, we conducted an interview study with 30 mobile game players. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we identified four motivations for playing fake games, such as curiosity and easy entertainment, and four coping mechanisms, including adaptive and reconciled play. We discuss how players uniquely interact with the fakeness of fake games and how these games form a distinct ecosystem at the intersection of digital platforms, digital marketplaces, and game developers. We conclude with implications for research and design to mitigate their impact and improve the gaming environment.

Predatory monetization in video games refers to purchasing systems that hide or postpone the complete financial consequences until players are already deeply committed, both financially and emotionally. These systems manipulate players into spending against their genuine interests, benefiting game companies while causing potential financial harm. This issue has drawn increasing scholarly and societal attention, but little research has explored how players perceive the influence of predatory monetization on their gaming experiences. Through an interview study with 23 players of popular user-generated games hosted on platforms such as Roblox and Minecraft and a reflexive thematic analysis, we identified three key influences of predatory monetization: felt manipulation, monetized interpersonal relationships, and risks with mitigation strategies. We further describe social monetization, where monetization and players’ social experiences are closely intertwined, as well as the ecosystem of predatory monetization, where multiple stakeholders play interconnected roles in enabling and sustaining predatory monetization practices. Finally, we offer design implications for mitigating the negative influences of predatory monetization.

Metaverse platforms have been on the rise in recent years, offering three-dimensional (3D), immersive virtual worlds while encouraging user-generated content (UGC) in various forms. Roblox, a popular metaverse platform, enables its users to create a holistic virtual world (i.e., develop a 3D game) for other users to interact with. However, complex UGC is also challenging to moderate. Roblox has been notorious for its users’ harmful designs, such as Nazi or terrorist role-playing mechanisms. In this study, we explore how harmful design takes place on Roblox. Through a grounded theory analysis of the ‘r/Robloxgamedev’ subreddit, we conceptualize an ecological view of harmful design, foregrounding three interconnected circumstances, namely sociotechnical risks, socioeconomic precarities, and normative (in)sensitivities, which work together to condition and give rise to harmful designs and bring about unique governance challenges to metaverse platforms. We conclude by laying out implications for design moderation.

Protecting children’s online privacy is paramount. Online platforms seek to enhance child privacy protection by implementing new classification systems into their content moderation practices. One prominent example is YouTube’s “made for kids” (MFK) classification. However, traditional content moderation focuses on managing content rather than users’ privacy; little is known about how users experience these classification systems. Thematically analyzing online discussions about YouTube’s MFK classification system, we present a case study on content creators’ and consumers’ experiences. We found that creators and consumers perceived MFK classification as misaligned with their actual practices, creators encountered unexpected consequences of practicing labeling, and creators and consumers identified MFK classification’s intersections with other platform designs. Our findings shed light on an interwoven network of multiple classification systems that extends the original focus on child privacy to encompass broader child safety issues; these insights contribute to the design principles of child-centered safety within this intricate network.

Tracking is inherent in and central to the gig economy. Platforms track gig workers’ performance through metrics such as acceptance rate and punctuality, while gig workers themselves engage in self-tracking. Although prior research has extensively examined how gig platforms track workers through metrics – with some studies briefly acknowledging the phenomenon of self-tracking among workers – there is a dearth of studies that explore how and why gig workers track themselves. To address this, we conducted 25 semi-structured interviews, revealing how gig workers self-track to manage accountabilities to themselves and external entities across three identities: the holistic self, the entrepreneurial self, and the platformized self. We connect our findings to neoliberalism, through which we contextualize gig workers’ self-accountability and the invisible labor of self-tracking. We further discuss how self-tracking mitigates information and power asymmetries in gig work and offer design implications to support gig workers’ multi-dimensional self-tracking.

Financial trading has become commonplace, involving the purchase and sale of securities such as stocks and bonds. While HCI research has investigated people’s financial literacy and decision-making and how to design for it, little is known as to how people form financial conversations on social media. To answer this question, we used a grounded theory approach to analyzing financial conversations in the YOLO (‘you only live once’) posts on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit (WSB), one of today’s largest financial online communities. We describe how WSB’s discursive culture portrays its gambling-like, high-risk trading by likening trading to gambling, celebrating it, and normalizing financial risk-taking. We discuss the rise of social investing, including how individual investors’ affective relationships encourage their outsized risk-taking, as well as reflect on its looming financial risks, especially to already marginalized groups. Lastly, we propose implications for design and policymaking.

Moderation systems of online games often follow a retributive model inspired by real-world criminal justice, expecting that punishments can help users to reform behavior. However, decades of criminological research show that punishments alone do not work and call for a rehabilitative approach, such as community-based rehabilitation (CBR), to help offenders transform their minds and behavioral patterns. Motivated by this call, we explore how moderated users view punishments in a community context and how other community members respond in League of Legends (LoL), one of the largest online games. Specifically, we focus on how peer support is sought and provided on the /r/LeagueOfLegends subreddit, the largest LoL-related online community. Our content analysis of player discussions characterized the communication between moderated users and peers as informative, constructive, and reflexive. We highlight the importance of involving community in moderation systems and discuss implications for designing CBR mechanisms that could enhance moderation systems.

After the overturn of Roe v. Wade gave states the license to ban abortion, numerous people in US have grown to worry about privacy in using period and fertility tracking apps. To address these concerns, some app companies have issued public statements to engage in privacy communication with their users. Prior literature has investigated period and fertility tracking apps’ data practices in their privacy policies. However, there remains a dearth of knowledge regarding how companies use privacy communication to address historic privacy-related events such as the overturn. To address the gap, this study investigated app companies’ public statements addressing the overturn of Roe using a combined approach of thematic and discourse analysis. Our findings revealed that companies strategically emphasize their commitment to privacy by demonstrating how their business practices and values are closely intertwined with their efforts to protect user data. We conclude by discussing translatable implications for privacy research.

Mobile games have become highly popular and profitable. While much work has been done to understand deceptive patterns of games and some unethical practices they apply, little is known about fake games, an emergent phenomenon in mobile gaming. To answer this question, we conducted two studies: a walkthrough method to characterize fake games, and a thematic analysis of user reviews to gain understanding from the user perspective. We found five types of misalignments that render a game fake and identified four primary facets of player experience with fake games. These misalignments act as realization points in the users' decision-making to define games as being fake. We discuss the fakeness of fake games, how the formation of an ecosystem helps with the circulation of fakeness, as well as challenges to governing fake games. Lastly, we propose implications for research and design on how to mitigate and identify fake games.

On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which has led to full bans on most abortions in 14 states within one year. Many people in the U.S. use period and fertility tracking apps for reproductive healthcare and concerns have arisen about the privacy risks these apps might pose in the wake of Roe reversal. Existing literature on privacy risks of period and fertility tracking apps has primarily examined the privacy policies and practices of these apps. However, how users make sense of the privacy risks of these apps, especially in the post-Roe time, remains understudied. This study explores collective privacy sensemaking on social media, a practice in which people collectively make sense of a privacy situation. Our findings reveal how people contextualize privacy issues, speculate about the associated risks, as well as explore risk mitigation strategies. We conclude with privacy design implications for privacy design in period and fertility tracking apps and contribute insights that could inform policymaking and legal perspectives.

Competitive gaming, a long-standing study context for CSCW, has recently faced criticism due to its design emphasis on competition and achievement, which is associated with adverse phenomena such as player toxicity and anxiety. Recognizing this limit, game designers have proactively made design attempts to ameliorate these unintended consequences of competitive gaming. A notable example is the All Random All Mid (ARAM) mode in League of Legends (LoL), designed to introduce casualness into competitive gaming. To understand how players experience both casualness and competitiveness, a seemingly contradictory pair, we conducted an interview study with ARAM players, finding that ARAM supports 'casual competition' through decentering competition, diversifying interpersonal dynamics, and filling gaps in player needs. We further discuss how game design and player agency co-constitute casual competition, reflect on key aspects of competitive gaming design such as diversity and fairness, and provide implications for competitive gaming design, which may help combat toxicity.

An increasing number of game platforms, such as Roblox, enable game creators to develop user-generated games (UGGs). Yet, these platforms often come under scrutiny for hosting UGGs that contain harmful content, ranging from sexually explicit material to Nazi-themed roleplay. Limited attention has been paid to how harmful UGGs are ideated by game creators. To address this question, we studied an online Roblox creator community, where Roblox creators collectively engage in design ideation to brainstorm design ideas for UGGs. Through an inductive thematic analysis, we found three primary ways where Roblox creators' design ideation becomes risky, including how Roblox creators generate risky game design ideas, navigate through policy boundaries to develop these ideas, and share strategies of bypassing moderation. Based on our findings, we discuss ethical and governance challenges facing user-generated games. We propose design implications to support game creators in developing ethical game design ideas and safe game designs.

Toxicity in online games refers to behaviors where players disrupt the gaming experience of others, leading to adverse outcomes such as depression and low self-esteem. Although scholars have identified various factors contributing to toxicity, ranging from individual motivations to team dynamics to cultural backgrounds, the role of game design has been less frequently discussed. To bridge this gap, we conducted an interview study to explore players' perceptions of how game design influences toxicity. Our research identified four game design elements that participants perceived as contributing factors to the emergency of toxicity in their experiences: team interdependency, fairness, interaction design, and privacy. These findings help us shed light on how game design unintendedly triggers toxic intentions, exposes players to vulnerability, making them potential victims, and affects player interactions which lead to toxicity. We further propose design implications that can mitigate toxicity in online games.

Metaverse platforms such as Roblox have become increasingly popular and profitable through a business model that relies on their end users to create and interact with user-generated virtual worlds (UGVWs). However, UGVWs are difficult to moderate, because game design is inherently more complex than static content such as text and images; and Roblox, a game platform targeted primarily at child players, is notorious for harmful user-generated game such as Nazi roleplay games and gambling-like mechanisms. To develop a better understanding of how harmful design is embedded in UGVWs, we conducted an empirical study to understand Roblox users’ experiences with harmful design. We identified several primary ways in which user-generated game designs can be harmful, ranging from directly injecting inappropriate content into the virtual environment of UGVWs to embedding problematic incentive mechanisms into the UGVWs. We further discuss opportunities and challenges for mitigating harmful designs.

Multiplayer online games seek to address toxic behaviors such as trolling and griefing through behavior moderation, where penalties such as chat restriction or account suspension are issued against toxic players in the hope that punishments create a teachable moment for punished players to reflect and improve future behavior. While punishments impact player experience (PX) in profound ways, little is known regarding how players experience behavior moderation. In this study, we conducted a survey of 291 players to understand their experiences with punishments in online multiplayer games. Through several statistical analyses, we found that moderation explanation plays a critical role in improving players’ perceived transparency and fairness of moderation; and these perceptions significantly affect what players do after punishments. We discuss moderation experience as an important facet of PX, bridge the game and moderation literature, and provide design implications for behavior moderation in multiplayer online games.

Online platforms like YouTube and Instagram have enabled the platformization and monetization of creative work, allowing content creators to derive revenue and thrive in a creator economy. While much work has been done to understand content creation on single platforms, the creative practice often involves content creators’ agency and practice to interact with multiple platforms and make strategic decisions to optimize such interactions. In this paper, we use an interview study with 21 cross-platform creators to understand how they negotiate with platforms in their creative practices through the construction of creator ecology. We found that participants developed priorities among platforms based on varied criteria, paid attention to cross-platform content synchronization, and stressed managing and converting audiences across platforms to grow their fanbase. Our findings highlight the complex interplay between creator agency and labor, as well as yield implications for future design possibilities of creator empowerment and support.

Transparency matters a lot to people who experience moderation on online platforms; much CSCW research has viewed offering explanations as one of the primary solutions to enhance moderation transparency. However, relatively little attention has been paid to unpacking what transparency entails in moderation design, especially for content creators. We interviewed 28 YouTubers to understand their moderation experiences and analyze the dimensions of moderation transparency. We identified four primary dimensions: participants desired the moderation system to present moderation decisions saliently, explain the decisions profoundly, afford communication with the users effectively, and offer repairment and learning opportunities. We discuss how these four dimensions are mutually constitutive and conditioned in the context of creator moderation, where the target of governance mechanisms extends beyond the content to creator careers. We then elaborate on how a dynamic, transparency perspective could value content creators' digital labor, how transparency design could support creators' learning, as well as implications for transparency design of other creator platforms.

Researchers across various fields have investigated how users experience moderation through different perspectives and methodologies. At present, there is a pressing need of synthesizing and extracting key insights from prior literature to formulate a systematic understanding of what constitutes a moderation experience and to explore how such understanding could further inform moderation-related research and practices. To answer this question, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) by analyzing 42 empirical studies related to moderation experiences and published between January 2016 and March 2022. We describe these studies' characteristics and how they characterize users' moderation experiences. We further identify five primary perspectives that prior researchers use to conceptualize moderation experiences. These findings suggest an expansive scope of research interests in understanding moderation experiences and considering moderated users as an important stakeholder group to reflect on current moderation design but also pertain to the dominance of the punitive, solutionist logic in moderation and ample implications for future moderation research, design, and practice.

The prevalence of social media blurs the boundaries between consumer and producer, work and play, and leads to new social roles, professions, and identities (e.g. blogger, YouTuber, micro-celebrity). However, we still lack a clear understanding of how people come to identify with these new roles and how individual professional development is digitally mediated. This paper presents a study based on Bilibili, a popular Chinese social media platform featuring user-generated videos, and highlights a professionalization process through which individuals consciously distinguish between the roles of uploaders and consumers, develop a shared work ethos around the role of the uploader, and, as uploaders, improve their technical-professional expertise. We conclude by discussing individualized professionalization as a concept that describes the bottom-up and community-based process of professional development for User Generated Content (UGC) taking place in contemporary digital media environments.

Esports, like traditional sports, face governance challenges such as foul play and match fixing. The esports industry has seen various attempts at governance structure but is yet to form a consensus. In this study, we explore esports governance in League of Legends (LoL), a major esports title. Through a two-stage, mixed-methods analysis of rule enforcement that Riot Games, LoL's developer and publisher, has performed against esports participants such as professional players and teams, we qualitatively describe rule breaking behaviors and penalties in LoL esports, and quantitatively measure how contextual factors such as time, perpetrator identity, and region might influence governance outcomes. These findings about rule enforcement allow us to characterize the esports governance of LoL as top-down and paternalistic, and to reflect upon professional players' work and professionalization in the esports context. We conclude by discussing translatable implications for esports governance practice and research.

How social media platforms could fairly conduct content moderation is gaining attention from society at large. Researchers from HCI and CSCW have investigated whether certain factors could affect how users perceive moderation decisions as fair or unfair. However, little attention has been paid to unpacking or elaborating on the formation processes of users' perceived (un)fairness from their moderation experiences, especially users who monetize their content. By interviewing 21 for-profit YouTubers (i.e., video content creators), we found three primary ways through which participants assess moderation fairness, including equality across their peers, consistency across moderation decisions and policies, and their voice in algorithmic visibility decision-making processes. Building upon the findings, we discuss how our participants' fairness perceptions demonstrate a multi-dimensional notion of moderation fairness and how YouTube implements an algorithmic assemblage to moderate YouTubers. We derive translatable design considerations for a fairer moderation system on platforms affording creator monetization.

Online platforms rely upon users or automated tools to flag toxic behaviors, the very first step in online moderation. While much recent research has examined online moderation, the role of flag remains poorly understood. This question becomes even more urgent in automated moderation, where flagging becomes a primary source of human judgment. We conducted a qualitative study of flagging practices in League of Legends (LoL), a popular eSports game. We found stark differences between how flag is designed to identify toxicity, and flaggability, or how players use and appropriate flag. Players distrust flag, but also appropriate flag for instrumental purposes. Thus, flaggability diverges decidedly from the conception of toxicity, and must be understood within the highly competitive gaming context of LoL. These findings help shed light on the situated nature of flaggability, the role of flag in online moderation, as well as implications for designing flag and moderation.

Online symptom checkers (OSC) are widely used intelligent systems in health contexts such as primary care, remote healthcare, and epidemic control. OSCs use algorithms such as machine learning to facilitate self-diagnosis and triage based on symptoms input by healthcare consumers. However, intelligent systems’ lack of transparency and comprehensibility could lead to unintended consequences such as misleading users, especially in high-stakes areas such as healthcare. In this paper, we attempt to enhance diagnostic transparency by augmenting OSCs with explanations. We first conducted an interview study (N=25) to specify user needs for explanations from users of existing OSCs. Then, we designed a COVID-19 OSC that was enhanced with three types of explanations. Our lab-controlled user study (N=20) found that explanations can significantly improve user experience in multiple aspects. We discuss how explanations are interwoven into conversation flow and present implications for future OSC designs.

Recently, consumer-facing health technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based symptom checkers (AISCs) have sprung up in everyday healthcare practice. AISCs solicit symptom information from users and provide medical suggestions and possible diagnoses, a responsibility that people usually entrust with real-person authorities such as physicians and expert patients. Thus, the advent of AISCs begs a question of whether and how they transform the notion of medical authority in people's everyday healthcare practice. To answer this question, we conducted an interview study with thirty AISC users. We found that users assess the medical authority of AISCs using various factors including AISCs’ automated decisions and interaction design patterns, associations with established medical authorities like hospitals, and comparisons with other health technologies. We reveal how AISCs are used in healthcare delivery, discuss how AI transforms conventional understandings of medical authority, and derive implications for designing AI-enabled health technology.

Platforms face the challenge of managing toxic behaviors such as flaming, hateful remarks, and harassment. To discipline their users, platforms usually adopt a punitive approach that issues punishments ranging from a warning message to content removal to permanent ban (PB). As the severest punishment, PB deprives the user of their privileges on the platform, such as account access and purchased content. But little is known regarding the experiential side of PB within the user community. In this study, we analyzed PB in League of Legends, one of the largest online games today. We argue that what PB does is not precisely to discipline players into well-behaved community members. Rather, PB functions to produce the stereotype of "the most toxic player" in the community and is best seen as a platform rhetoric. We further discuss the need to contextualize toxicity from the restorative lens.

To manage user-generated harmful video content, YouTube relies on AI algorithms (e.g., machine learning) in content moderation and follows a retributive justice logic to punish convicted YouTubers through demonetization, a penalty that limits or deprives them of advertisements (ads), reducing their future ad income. Moderation research is burgeoning in CSCW, but relatively little attention has been paid to the socioeconomic implications of YouTube's algorithmic moderation. Drawing from the lens of algorithmic labor, we describe how algorithmic moderation shapes YouTubers' labor conditions through algorithmic opacity and precarity. YouTubers coped with such challenges from algorithmic moderation by sharing and applying practical knowledge they learned about moderation algorithms. By analyzing video content creation as algorithmic labor, we unpack the socioeconomic implications of algorithmic moderation and point to necessary post-punishment support as a form of restorative justice. Lastly, we put forward design considerations for algorithmic moderation systems.

Crisis informatics research has examined geographically bounded crises, such as natural or man-made disasters, identifying the critical role of local and hyper-local information focused on one geographic area in crisis communication. The COVID-19 pandemic represents an understudied kind of crisis that simultaneously hits locales across the globe, engendering an emergent form of crisis communication, which we term cross-local communication. Cross-local communication is the exchange of crisis information between geographically dispersed locales to facilitate local crisis response. To unpack this notion, we present a qualitative study of an online migrant community of overseas Taiwanese who supported fellow Taiwanese from afar. We detail four distinctive types of cross-local communication: situational updates, risk communication, medical consultation, and coordination. We discuss how the current pandemic situation brings new understandings to crisis informatics and online health community literature, and what role digital technologies could play in supporting cross-local communication.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become prevalent in our everyday technologies and impacts both individuals and communities. The explainable AI (XAI) scholarship has explored the philosophical nature of explanation and technical explanations, which are usually driven by experts in lab settings and can be challenging for laypersons to understand. In addition, existing XAI research tends to focus on the individual level. Little is known about how people understand and explain AI-led decisions in the community context. Drawing from XAI and activity theory, a foundational HCI theory, we theorize how explanation is situated in a community's shared values, norms, knowledge, and practices, and how situated explanation mediates community-AI interaction. We then present a case study of AI-led moderation, where community members collectively develop explanations of AI-led decisions, most of which are automated punishments. Lastly, we discuss the implications of this framework at the intersection of CSCW, HCI, and XAI.

Today eSports gaming is enjoying growing popularity in the world and much attention from various research areas, including CSCW. eSports gaming is a highly competitive environment commonly associated with negative emotions such as anxiety and stress. However, little attention has been paid to emotion regulation in eSports gaming. In this study, we empirically investigated how players experience emotion and regulate emotions in League of Legends, one of the largest eSports games today. We identify four emotive factors, as well as emotion regulation strategies that players deploy to manage the emotions of their selves, teammates, and opponents. We further report on how they use emotion regulation in emotional self-care and emotional leadership. Building upon this set of findings, we discuss how the competitive eSports gaming context conditions emotion regulation in League of Legends, foreground emotion regulation expertise in competitive gaming, and derive implications for designing emotion regulation technologies.

Many mobile games are designed to be placeless, so that mobile device owners could play anytime, anywhere. But does such design erase the sense of place in mobile gaming? To investigate the spatiality of mobile gaming, we conducted an ethnographic study of mobile gaming in a Chinese university. We found mobile gaming as a form of collocated interaction, where participants collectively created meanings around distinctive places on the campus including dormitory, classroom, and laboratory, and engaged in collaborative play. Their mobile collocated gaming was shaped by the social, organizational, and cultural contexts of places. The spatiality of mobile collocated gaming entails both appropriation of the norms and expectations of places and creation of new meanings to negotiate tensions between mobile gaming and places. We further discuss the spatiality of mobile collocated gaming and broader social and cultural conditions.

The contours of user experience (UX) design practice have been shaped by a diverse array of practitioners and disciplines, resulting in a diffuse and decentralized body of UX-specific disciplinary knowledge. The rapidly shifting space that UX knowledge occupies, in conjunction with a long-existing research-practice gap, presents unique challenges and opportunities to UX educators and aspiring UX designers. In this paper, we analyzed a corpus of question and answer communication on UX Stack Exchange using a practice-led approach, identifying and documenting practitioners' conceptions of UX knowledge over a nine year period. Specifically, we used natural language processing techniques and qualitative content analysis to identify a disciplinary vocabulary invoked by UX designers in this online community, as well as conceptual trajectories spanning over nine years which could shed light on the evolution of UX practice. We further describe the implications of our findings for HCI research and UX education.

Everyday life is increasingly mediated by technology. Technology is rapidly growing capacity and complexity, especially evident in developments in artificial intelligence and big data analytics. As human-computer interaction (HCI) endeavors to examine and theorize how people act and interact with the ever-evolving technology, an important, emerging concern is how the self-the totality of internal qualities such as consciousness and agency-plays out in relation to the technology-mediated external world. To analyze this question, we draw from Michel Foucault's ethics of "care of the self," which examines how the self is constituted through conscious and reflective work on self-transformation. We present three case studies to illustrate how individuals carry out practices of the self to reflect upon and negotiate their relationship with technology. We discuss the importance of examining the self and foreground the notion of care of the self in HCI research and design.

Live streaming is a highly participatory form of performance, involving various types of audience participation such as liking, commenting, and gifting. But how do streamers and audiences collaborate to deliver live streaming performances? We approach this question through an interview study with 30 spectators and eight streamers in China. Drawing from theatrical engagement research, we use the cogitative spatial concept of center-peripheral attention of the audience to analyze the complex interplay between streamers and spectators, where the former occupy the center and the latter the periphery. We then discuss the orchestration of the center and the periphery, where streamers and spectators coordinate their respective performances, as well as the interaction between the center and the periphery, where the center-periphery distinction blurs. Based on these findings, we discuss co-performance as a theatrical metaphor for understanding live streaming and audience engagement.

Social media is often analyzed as a "front stage" where social media users perform their identities and manage impressions through various forms of user-generated content: text, picture, video, as well as visual expression such as emoticon, emoji, sticker, and meme. Previous scholarship has suggested various functions of visual expression in supporting computer-mediated communication. In this study, we move beyond the utility perspective to ask what constitutes the literacy to utilize visual expression for impression management. Towards this goal, we conducted an interview study with 30 social media users in China. We found that visual literacy intersects with its cultural context. Our interviewees used text and visual expressions in sophisticated, skillful ways and tailored for different audiences in order to construct desired images. They also interacted with audience memory in order to perform their uniqueness and creativity. Lastly, we discuss culturally-embedded visual literacy and provide implications for design.

Interest in critical scholarship that engages with the complexity of user experience (UX) practice is rapidly expanding, yet the vocabulary for describing and assessing criticality in practice is currently lacking. In this paper, we outline and explore the limits of a specific ethical phenomenon known as "dark patterns," where user value is supplanted in favor of shareholder value. We assembled a corpus of examples of practitioner-identified dark patterns and performed a content analysis to determine the ethical concerns contained in these examples. This analysis revealed a wide range of ethical issues raised by practitioners that were frequently conflated under the umbrella term of dark patterns, while also underscoring a shared concern that UX designers could easily become complicit in manipulative or unreasonably persuasive practices. We conclude with implications for the education and practice of UX designers, and a proposal for broadening research on the ethics of user experience.

Crisis informatics has examined how institutions and individuals seek, communicate, and curate information in response to crises. The public's communication and perception of risks on social media remain understudied. In this study, we report a qualitative analysis of public perceptions of risks and risk management measures on Reddit during the Zika crisis, an emerging epidemic associated with high uncertainty regarding pathology, epidemiology, and broad consequences. We found two types of perceived risks: ones directly caused by the Zika virus, and ones potentially introduced by authorities' risk management measures. Risk perceptions unfolded along multiple dimensions beyond the imminent and personal level. Reddit users discussed in a speculative way to foresee various risks in the long run or at larger geographical scales. We discuss the multidimensionality and speculative nature of risk perception on social media, and derive implications for crisis informatics research and public health research and practice.

Streakiness refers to observed tendency towards consecutive appearances of particular patterns. In video games, streakiness is oftentimes inevitable, where a player keeps winning or losing for a short period. However, the phenomenon remains understudied in present online game research. How do players perceive streakiness? How does it impact player experience (PX)? How should streakiness be taken into consideration for the design of PX? In this paper, we address these questions through a qualitative study of player discussions about streakiness in League of Legends. We found that players developed various ways to describe a streak. Both winning and losing streaks negatively impacted PX. Players devised numerous strategies to manage streakiness, among which disengagement was a primary means. We analyze streakiness as a social construct through which players coped with complex game systems. We discuss design implications for managing streakiness in online games.

The Internet plays an important role in the formation of political opinions by supporting citizens in discovering diverse political information and opinions. However, the echo chamber effect has become of increasing concern, referring to the tendency for people to encounter opinions and information similar to their own online. It remains poorly understood how ordinary citizens use the Internet in the formation of political opinions. To answer this question, we conducted an interview study with 32 Chinese citizens. We found that participants used complex strategies to coordinate personal networks and technologies in specific ways to better understand political events. To analyze this phenomenon, we draw on Bødker and Andersen's model of complex mediation which describes how multiple mediators including people and artifacts work together to mediate an activity. We discuss how complex mediation supported participants in informing their political opinions. We derive design implications for supporting people to form political opinions.

The occupational landscape of the digital economy is rapidly changing, resulting in the emergence of multidisciplinary occupations. Emerging occupations such as user experience (UX) design are in high demand, but these occupations lack clear boundaries and have yet to develop into a profession with a specified, coherent body of knowledge. While traditional occupations such as medicine and law successfully claimed their professional jurisdiction and high social power and status long before the Internet, how do these emerging occupations work towards professionalization, particularly as they are increasingly supported by and through online communities? In this paper, we investigate an online UX community to understand how UX practitioners specify their occupational knowledge and professional boundaries. Using this case as an example and provocation, we discuss how online communities support the emergence of new occupations and may play an indispensable role in modern day patterns of professionalization.

Quantification is a process that produces and communicates numbers, imbued with the expectation of generating knowledge and optimizing human behavior and social process. In this paper, we explore how quantification mediates virtual teamwork through an ethnographic study of quantification in League of Legends, a popular team-based online game with a highly competitive culture. In the game, rich statistics about each individual player's gaming history and performance are publicly available, analyzed and displayed on numerous third-party sites. We describe how players were entangled with numbers. They derived knowledge from numbers but struggled with proper ways of interpretation. They utilized numbers to quantify teammates and opponents, but in-game tensions and conflicts easily ensued. They noticed how quantification became burdensome and stressed the importance of proper use. We discuss how this case of quantified self and others manifests complex relationships between self-knowledge, numerical authority, and virtual teamwork.

CSCW scholarship has previously addressed how professionals use digital technologies for learning and communication, but limited attention has been paid to professional self-disclosure on social media. Acts of self-disclosure-intentionally revealing personal information to others-are often considered beneficial for communication and formation of relationships, and describing the role of disclosure in professional communication is important to advance CSCW research that focuses on occupations or organizational settings. In this paper, we present a mixed-methods study of professional self-disclosure in an online community focused on user experience design (UX), documenting how acts of self-disclosure may support professional development. We found that self-disclosure was frequently used as an effective rhetorical and content-focused strategy to provoke discussions and request assistance with the goal of developing or maintaining professional competence. Through the identification of these self-disclosure strategies, we discuss professional self-disclosure in relation to professional identity development in online communities.

Live streaming is a new media format that simultaneously records and broadcasts in real time, in multiple channels including video, audio, and text. A new application area of live streaming is in the video game community, where players stream their gameplay. Since most of the streamed games are team-based, one's live streaming may involve other players' gameplay and disclosure. In the present paper, we aim to understand the attitudes and strategies of players who have been streamed by others in video game live streaming. From an interview study with 20 World of Warcraft (WoW) players, we found that participants had concerns about being streamed due to different factors, and adopted individual and collaborative strategies to cope with their concerns. We discuss privacy challenges in live streaming and present design implications for live streaming tools to improve privacy management.

Recently, diseases like H1N1 influenza, Ebola, and Zika virus have created severe crises, requiring public resources and personal behavior adaptation. Crisis Informatics literature examines interconnections of people, organizations, and IT during crisis events. However, how people use technology to cope with disease crises (outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics) remains understudied. We investigate how individuals used social media in response to the outbreak of Zika, focusing on travel-related decisions. We found that extreme uncertainty and ambiguity characterized the Zika virus crisis. To cope, people turned to social media for information gathering and social learning geared towards personal risk assessment and modifying decisions when dealing with partial and conflicting information about Zika. In particular, individuals sought local information and used socially informed logical reasoning to deduce the risk at a specific locale. We conclude with implications for designing information systems to support individual risk assessment and decision-making when faced with uncertainty and ambiguity during public health crises.

We report an ethnographic study of prosocial behavior inconnection to League of Legends, one of the most popular games in the world. In this game community, the game developer, Riot Games, implemented a system that allowed players to volunteer their time to identify unacceptable player behaviors and punish players associated with these behaviors. With the prosocial goal of improving the community and promoting sportsmanship with in the competitive culture, a small portion of players worked diligently in the system with little reward. In this paper, we use interviews and analysis of forum discussions to examine how players themselves explain their participation in the system situated in the game culture of League of Legends. We show a myriad of social and technical factors that facilitated or hindered players' prosocial behavior. We discuss how our findings might provide generalizable insights for player engagement and community-building in online games.

We report a study of peer support in online health communities for pregnancy care along three gestational stages (trimesters) to investigate how pregnant women seek and receive peer support during different stages of pregnancy. Using Babycenter.com as our research setting, we found that pregnant women sought peer support due to constrained access to healthcare providers, dissatisfaction with healthcare services/medical advice, limited offline social support, and unavailability of information in other venues. While the particular topics of concern typifying each trimester were distinct, pregnant women consistently sought advice, informal and formal knowledge, reassurance, and emotional support from peers during each stage of pregnancy. BabyCenter.com peers provided support by leveraging their own experiential knowledge and passing along clinical expertise acquired during the course of their own healthcare. We discuss design implications for health services and IT systems that meet pregnant women's temporal and multi-faceted needs during prenatal care.

Critique is an important component of creative work in design education and practice, through which individuals can solicit advice and obtain feedback on their work. Face-to-face critique in offline settings such as design studios has been well-documented and theorized. However, little is known about unstructured distributed critique in online creative communities where people share and critique each other's work, and how these practices might resemble or differ from studio critique. In this paper, we use mixed-methods to examine distributed critique practices in a UX-focused online creative community on Reddit. We found that distributed critique resembles studio critique categorically, but differs qualitatively. While studio critique often focuses on depth, distributed critique often revolved around collective sensemaking, through which creative workers engaged in iteratively interpreting, defining, and refining the artifact and their process. We discuss the relationship between distributed critique and socio-technical systems and identify implications for future research.

Conspiracy theories have gained much academic and media attention recently, due to their large impact on public events. Crisis informatics researchers have examined conspiracy theories as a type of rumor. However, little is known about how conspiracy theories are produced and developed on social media. We present a qualitative study of conspiracy theorizing on Reddit during a public health crisis--the Zika virus outbreak. Using a mixed-methods approach including content analysis and discourse analysis, we identified types of conspiracy theories that appeared on Reddit in response to the Zika crisis, the conditions under which Zika conspiracy theories emerge, and the particular discursive strategies through which Zika conspiracy theories developed in online forums. Our analysis shows that conspiracy talk emerged as people attempted to make sense of a public health crisis, reflecting their emergent information needs and their pervasive distrust in formal sources of Zika information. Practical implications for social computing researchers, health practitioners, and policymakers are discussed.

Disruptive behaviors such as flaming and vandalism have been part of the Internet since its beginning. Various models of hierarchical governance have been established and managed in different online venues, with both successes and failures. Recently, a new model of non-hierarchical governance has emerged using crowdsourcing technology to allow an online community to manage itself. How do people view and work with non-hierarchical governance? In this paper, we present an interview study with people from two sites: the video game League of Legends and Weibo, a microblogging site in China. We found that people were passionate about participation in crowdsourcing, but at the same time, struggled with the system, and acted beyond their designated role within the system. We derive implications for designing online non-hierarchical governance from our research.

While studies of social movements have mostly examined prevalent public discourses, undercurrents' the backstage practices consisting of meaning-making processes, narratives, and situated work-have received less attention. Through a qualitative interview study with sixteen participants, we examine the role of social media in supporting the undercurrents of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Interviews focused on an intense period of the movement exemplified by sit-in activities inspired by Occupy Wall Street in the USA. Whereas the use of Facebook for public discourse was similar to what has been reported in other studies, we found that an ecology of social media tools such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google Docs mediated undercurrents that served to ground the public discourse of the movement. We discuss how the undercurrents sustained and developed public discourses in concrete ways.