paper about Graffiti<\/a>, which will be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.<\/p>\nPersonalized, integrated applications<\/p>\n
With Graffiti, the researchers had two main goals: to lower the barrier to creating personalized social applications and to enable those personalized applications to interoperate without requiring permission from developers.<\/p>\n
To make the design process easier, they built a collective back-end infrastructure that all applications access to store and share content. This means developers don\u2019t need to write any complex server code. Instead, designing a Graffiti application is more like making a website using popular tools like Vue.<\/p>\n
Developers can also easily introduce new features and new types of content, giving them more freedom and fostering creativity.<\/p>\n
\u201cGraffiti is so straightforward that we used it as the infrastructure for the intro to web design class I teach, and students were able to write the front-end very easily to come up with all sorts of applications,\u201d Karger says.<\/p>\n
The open, interoperable nature of Graffiti means no one entity has the power to set a moderation policy for the entire platform. Instead, multiple competing and contradictory moderation services can operate, and people can choose the ones they like.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Graffiti uses the idea of \u201ctotal reification,\u201d where every action taken in Graffiti, such as liking, sharing, or blocking a post, is represented and stored as its own piece of data. A user can configure their social application to interpret or ignore those data using its own rules.<\/p>\n
For instance, if an application is designed so a certain user is a moderator, posts blocked by that user won\u2019t appear in the application. But for an application with different rules where that person isn\u2019t considered a moderator, other users might just see a warning or no flag at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cTheia\u2019s system lets each person pick their own moderators, avoiding the one-sized-fits-all approach to moderation taken by the major social platforms,\u201d Karger says.<\/p>\n
But at the same time, having no central moderator means there is no one to remove content from the platform that might be offensive or illegal.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to do more research to understand if that is going to provide real, damaging consequences or if the kind of personal moderation we created can provide the protections people need,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n
Empowering social media users<\/p>\n
The researchers also had to overcome a problem known as context collapse, which conflicts with their goal of interoperation.<\/p>\n
For instance, context collapse would occur if a person\u2019s Tinder profile appeared on LinkedIn, or if a post intended for one group, like close friends, would create conflict with another group, such as family members. Context collapse can lead to anxiety and have social repercussions for the user and their different communities.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe realize that interoperability can sometimes be a bad thing. People have boundaries between different social contexts, and we didn\u2019t want to violate those,\u201d Henderson says.<\/p>\n
To avoid context collapse, the researchers designed Graffiti so all content is organized into distinct channels. Channels are flexible and can represent a variety of contexts, such as people, applications, locations, etc.<\/p>\n
If a user\u2019s post appears in an application channel but not their personal channel, others using that application will see the post, but those who only follow this user will not.<\/p>\n
\u201cIndividuals should have the power to choose the audience for whatever they want to say,\u201d Karger adds.<\/p>\n
The researchers created multiple Graffiti applications to showcase personalization and interoperability, including a community-specific application for a local concert venue, a text-centric microblogging platform patterned off X, a Wikipedia-like application that enables collective editing, and a real-time messaging app with multiple moderation schemes patterned off WhatsApp and Slack.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt also leaves room to create so many social applications people haven\u2019t thought of yet. I\u2019m really excited to see what people come up with when they are given full creative freedom,\u201d Henderson says.<\/p>\n
In the future, she and her colleagues want to explore additional social applications they could build with Graffiti. They also intend to incorporate tools like graphical editors to simplify the design process. In addition, they want to strengthen Graffiti\u2019s security and privacy.<\/p>\n
And while there is still a long way to go before Graffiti could be implemented at scale, the researchers are currently running a user study<\/a> as they explore the potential positive and negative impacts the system could have on the social media landscape.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Say a local concert venue wants to engage its community by giving social media followers an easy way…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[46024,46023,46022,3073,46025,46026,111,139,69,147,46021],"class_list":{"0":"post-54271","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-context-collapse","9":"tag-david-d-clark","10":"tag-david-karger","11":"tag-graffiti","12":"tag-interoperability","13":"tag-interoperation","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-science","18":"tag-theia-henderson"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}