Online, visual artists have more places than ever to routinely share their creative work and connect with other artists. These interactions support the routine enactment of creative identity in artists and provide inspirational opportunities for artists. As creative work shifts online, interactions between artists and routines around how these artists get inspired to do creative work are mediated by and through the logics of the online platforms where they take place. In an interview study of 22 artists, this paper explores the interplay between the development of artists’ creative identities and the, at times, contradictory practices they have around getting inspired. We find platforms which support the disciplined practice of creative work while supporting spontaneous moments of inspiration, play an increasing role in passive approaches to searching for inspiration, and foster numerous small community spaces for artists to negotiate their creative identities. We discuss how platforms can better support and embed mechanisms for inspiration into their infrastructures into their design and platform policy.

The creative internet is a network of online platforms, creative people, and communities where artists learn and grow together while also showcasing their artwork to others. While this space of people, technology, and routine presentation of art once held such promise for creatives, for many, that place is something that now only exists in memory. This paper presents an interview study with 22 visual artists who share their art in online social spaces. Taking a historical approach, we explore their journeys across the creative internet, the promise it held for them as artists, and how the creative internet became enshittified as online platforms got bigger. Through the lens of enshittification, we explore how changes in platform policy, design, and algorithmic mediation have shifted the creative practices of artists, and how, as artists contend with enshittified platform spaces, they are resilient and forward joy in their art. We discuss the role that nostalgia plays in the concept of enshittification, contributing insight into why people stay on increasingly hostile platforms, and suggest opportunities for platforms and artists alike to forward joy and resilience in the face of a now shittier internet.

Online, visual artists have more places than ever to routinely share their creative work and connect with other artists. These interactions support the routine enactment of creative identity in artists and provide inspirational opportunities for artists. As creative work shifts online, interactions between artists and routines around how these artists get inspired to do creative work are mediated by and through the logics of the online platforms where they take place. In an interview study of 22 artists, this paper explores the interplay between the development of artists' creative identities and the, at times, contradictory practices they have around getting inspired. We find platforms which support the disciplined practice of creative work while supporting spontaneous moments of inspiration, play an increasing role in passive approaches to searching for inspiration, and foster numerous small community spaces for artists to negotiate their creative identities. We discuss how platforms can better support and embed mechanisms for inspiration into their infrastructures into their design and platform policy.

Restrictive eating disorders (EDs) have among the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder. To date, little research has investigated the role of digital media in sharing ED experiences and promoting recovery for autistic individuals, despite high autism rates among those with EDs and the potential for social media (SM) to provide resources and support for adolescent girls and young women living with EDs. Given this gap, we undertook an exploratory study to assess content pertaining to autistic people’s difficulties with food and eating on the leading SM app TikTok. We identified four main themes: (a) EDs and autism; (b) cognitive, sensory, and behavioral dimensions of autistic eating and body issues; (c) social, cultural, and economic aspects of autistic people’s food challenges; and (d) self-reported role of TikTok in autistic individuals’ coping with food/eating difficulties. Our study contributes several novel findings to research on digital media, mental health, and marginalized populations.

LGBTQ+ people have received increased attention in HCI research, paralleling a greater emphasis on social justice in recent years. However, there has not been a systematic review of how LGBTQ+ people are researched or discussed in HCI. In this work, we review all research mentioning LGBTQ+ people across the HCI venues of CHI, CSCW, DIS, and TOCHI. Since 2014, we find a linear growth in the number of papers substantially about LGBTQ+ people and an exponential increase in the number of mentions. Research about LGBTQ+ people tends to center experiences of being politicized, outside the norm, stigmatized, or highly vulnerable. LGBTQ+ people are typically mentioned as a marginalized group or an area of future research. We identify gaps and opportunities for (1) research about and (2) the discussion of LGBTQ+ in HCI and provide a dataset to facilitate future Queer HCI research.

Social media platform success relies on users to consume, create, and share creative content. While some creatives aspire to become influencers, this is not the goal of all creatives, particularly those with smaller audiences. Through an interview study of 15 creatives on TikTok, we explore the often overlapping intentions for creating and sharing videos, as well as the challenges to maintaining these creative intentions and routines as they are shaped by platform logic. We find platforms introduce impediments which disrupt people’s creative routines and alienate people from their overlapping creative intentions; introducing challenges which alienate people from their sense of self, and their audiences. We construct a broader definition of creative labor - the work of professionalizing and monetizing a creative product shared on social media - reflecting on how the routine enactment of creative labor is impacted by infrastructural elements of technology.

Video games are an increasingly significant cultural touchstone in people’s everyday lives. However, preserving and archiving video games faces unique challenges, including intellectual property law, technology degradation, and the broader question of what it means to preserve a video game. In an exploratory study investigating sustainable game preservation practices, we spoke to 15 amateur game preservationists and hobbyists about their informal work with code, gaming consoles, and servers for online play. We found a lack of access to particular games during childhood or young adulthood led participants to seek out these games in other formats—such as emulated games they could play on other mediums (e.g., playing Nintendo games on your personal computer). Their nostalgia and the communities they found searching for these experiences inspired them to undertake archival work. Participants leveraged distributed knowledge across their communities to keep video games accessible for anyone interested in playing them. Considering these findings in the context of modern archival practices, we discuss what it means to archive a game, especially when that game is dependent on interactive, communal experiences, and what is potentially lost in current archival practices in contrast to informal, accidental archival work.

As our social worlds increasingly shift online, many of the technologies people encounter are mediated by algorithms. Algorithms have become deeply embedded into people's online lives, often working to tailor and personalize their routine encounters with the world. How does one domesticate, or make one's own, an algorithmic system? One of the goals as people adopt new technologies is to weave them into their everyday routines, establishing a pattern of use in order to make that technology their own. In this paper we focus on people's experiences domesticating the short-form video sharing application, TikTok. Through an interview study with 16 LGBTQ+ TikTok users, we explore how people's routine experiences with TikTok's For You Page algorithm influence and inform their domestication process. We first highlight people's motivations for adopting TikTok and the challenges they encounter in this initial acquisition phase of domestication. After adopting the platform, we discuss the challenges people experience across the final three phases of domestication: objectification, incorporation, and conversion. We find that though they enjoy TikTok, our participants feel that they are never fully able to domesticate TikTok. As they are never able to fully control their digital selves, and thus integrate it into their routine lives, TikTok is in constant misalignment with their personal moral economy. We discuss the implications of domesticating algorithmic systems, examining the questions of whose values shape the moral economy created by and through people's uses of algorithmic systems, and the impact of nostalgia on the domestication process.

User biography sections on digital social platforms (hereafter described as “user bios” or “bios”) are spaces for account holders to take narrative ownership in communicating their identities to other users and interlocutors. Online platforms, such as social media, are increasingly used as community hubs for disabled groups, and especially for autistic people (Author; Author; Sins Invalid, 2019). We focus on #Autisktok, one of many enclaves for autistic community building and cultural production on TikTok. Through a critical/cultural qualitative thematic analysis of #Autisktok user bios, we assess how the user bio mediates self-advocacy, agency, and autistic-centered knowledges on #Autisktok. To investigate how autistic TikTokers use their profile’s bio section as a space for “restorying” mainstream discourses about autism and agency, we draw upon M. Remi Yergeau’s (2018) work on autism and neuroqueer rhetorics and Arseli Dokumacı’s (2023) theory of micro-activist affordances, extending these frameworks toward the digital. We pose the following research questions: How do autistic youth use the bio section on TikTok to (re)story autism diagnosis? What is the user bio’s role in creating a supportive enclave for other autistic creators, users, and activists on the TikTok platform? Three themes emerged from our analysis: the explicit use of autism in the user bio, autism and intersecting identities, and the bio as a space for asserting agentic autistic selfhood.

Accessibility efforts, how we can make the world usable and useful to as many people as possible, have focused on how we can support and allow for the autonomy and independence of people with disabilities, neurodivergencies, chronic conditions, and older adults. Despite these efforts, not all technology is designed or implemented to support everyone's needs. TikTok. Recently, a community-organized push by creators and general users of TikTok urged the platform to add accessibility features, such as closed captioning, to allow more people to use the platform with greater ease. Through an interview study exploring the experiences of creatives on TikTok, we explore the creative practices of people with ADHD and those who experience similar challenges, focusing on the kinds of accessibility they create through their creative work. We find that creatives engage in critical infrastructuring--a process of bottom-up (re)design--to make the platform more accessible despite the challenges the platform presents to them as creators through creating and augmenting video editing and video captioning infrastructures. We then reflect on how the introduction of a top-down infrastructure - the implementation of an auto-captioning feature - shifts the critical infrastructure practices of TikTok creatives. Through their infrastructuring, creatives were revising the broader sociotechnical capabilities of TikTok to support their own needs as well as the broader needs of the TikTok community. We discuss how the routine of infrastructuring accessibility is a form of incidental care work and highlight how accessibility is an evolving sociotechnical construct, forwarding the concept of contextual accessibility.

Scholarship in the sociology of medicine has tended to characterize diagnosis as disruptive to one’s self-concept. This categorization, though, requires reconsideration in light of public conversations about mental health and community building around neurocognitive conditions, particularly among youth online. Drawing upon Tan’s notion of “biographical illumination” (BI), which describes how medical frameworks can enrich personal biographies, we explored the shifting nature of BI through the case of TikTok. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, we argue that TikTok serves as a space to discuss diagnosis and refine one’s sense of self as a result of diagnosis. However, such personal transformation is inseparable from the app’s affordances, or what we term “algorithmically mediated biographical illumination.” BI shapes TikTok as a platform, and TikTok informs BI as a psychosocial process, leading to what we call “platformed diagnosis.” These findings have broader critical applications for the study of algorithms, disability, and digital platforms.

With the emergence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), people are being exposed to an increased volume of crime-related information, which induces fear. While the fear of crime has been explored around people's experiences with crime, little is known about how people frame their conversations about crime online. In this study, we explore how citizens talk about crime on Reddit. By collecting crime conversations from the subreddit r/baltimore, we find that, on the surface, redditors discuss topics such as comparing crime rates in Baltimore with other cities in an effort to destigmatize the depictions of Baltimore as a city rife with crime. On a deeper level, we find that through their conversations about crime, redditors are engaging in discourse frames that both re-enforce and fight against platformed racism. On the one hand, some redditors perpetuate racially coded language that is rife with anti-Black stereotypes, framing their conversations using old and new racism to cover their racism and discrimination against Black people. On the other hand, others push back against platformed racism by drawing attention to individual racism and systemic racism, and situating crime in root, societal causes. We then discuss how platformed racism operates in online conversations, and develop the concepts of weaponized identity and digital gentrification, which we argue are ways in which people, through their engagements in digital platforms, continue to perpetuate white hegemonic power structures in society. Finally, we discuss implications for how to design to support the fight against platformed racism in sociotechnical systems like Reddit. As a content note and warning, this paper discusses racist content which may be upsetting or harmful to some readers.

As our social worlds increasingly shift online, many of the technologies people encounter are mediated by algorithms. Algorithms have become deeply embedded into people's online lives, often working to tailor and personalize their routine encounters with the world. How does one domesticate, or make one's own, an algorithmic system? One of the goals as people adopt new technologies is to weave them into their everyday routines, establishing a pattern of use in order to make that technology their own. In this paper we focus on people's experiences domesticating the short-form video sharing application, TikTok. Through an interview study with 16 LGBTQ+ TikTok users, we explore how people's routine experiences with TikTok's For You Page algorithm influence and inform their domestication process. We first highlight people's motivations for adopting TikTok and the challenges they encounter in this initial acquisition phase of domestication. After adopting the platform, we discuss the challenges people experience across the final three phases of domestication: objectification, incorporation, and conversion. We find that though they enjoy TikTok, our participants feel that they are never fully able to domesticate TikTok. As they are never able to fully control their digital selves, and thus integrate it into their routine lives, TikTok is in constant misalignment with their personal moral economy. We discuss the implications of domesticating algorithmic systems, examining the questions of whose values shape the moral economy created by and through people's uses of algorithmic systems, and the impact of nostalgia on the domestication process.

Modern election campaigns leverage social media and the networks within to get their messages directly out to the public. We use the theory of extended party networks to explore networks of engaged users who extensively amplify messages posted by political candidates. Using Twitter data from the Senate races in the U.S. 2018 midterm election, we build Twitter extended party networks out of dedicated amplifiers to understand how those engaged users associate with the candidate message amplification. Results show that certain super-amplifiers have a disproportionately large impact on information flows, and that decentralized networks with higher rates of follower reciprocity are associated with higher rates of message diffusion. Our study also finds some support for the idea that super-amplifiers engage in coordinated efforts to diffuse political messages.

Modern election campaigns leverage social media and the networks within to get their messages directly out to the public. We use the theory of extended party networks to explore networks of engaged users who extensively amplify messages posted by political candidates. Using Twitter data from the Senate races in the U.S. 2018 midterm election, we build Twitter extended party networks out of dedicated amplifiers to understand how those engaged users associate with the candidate message amplification. Results show that certain super-amplifiers have a disproportionately large impact on information flows, and that decentralized networks with higher rates of follower reciprocity are associated with higher rates of message diffusion. Our study also finds some support for the idea that super-amplifiers engage in coordinated efforts to diffuse political messages.

As Queer Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) becomes an established part of the larger field, both in terms of research on and with queer populations and in terms of employing queering theories and methods, the role of queer researchers has become a timely topic of discussion. However, these discussions have largely centered around member-researcher status and positionality when working with queer populations. Based on insights gathered at multiple ACM events over the past two years, we identified two pressing issues: (1) we need to better support queer people doing HCI research not specific to queer populations, and (2) we need to identify how to best support member-researchers in leading Queer HCI while including collaborators beyond the queer community. This Special Interest Group (SIG) aims to directly address these challenges by convening a broad community of queer researchers and allies, working not only on explicitly-queer topics but across a broad range of HCI topics.

Online communities provide spaces for people who are vulnerable and underserved to seek support and build community, such as LGBTQ+ people. Today, some online community spaces are mediated by algorithms. Scholarship has found that algorithms have become deeply embedded in the systems that mediate our routine engagements with the world. Yet, little is known about how these systems impact those who are most vulnerable in society. In this paper, we focus on people's everyday experiences with one algorithmic system, the short video sharing application TikTok. TikTok recently received press that it was suppressing and oppressing the identities of its growing LGBTQ+ user population through algorithmic and human moderation of LGBTQ+ creators and content related to LGBTQ+ identity. Through an interview study with 16 LGBTQ+ TikTok users, we explore people's everyday engagements and encounters with the platform. We find that TikTok's For You Page algorithm constructs contradictory identity spaces that at once support LGBTQ+ identity work and reaffirm LGBTQ+ identity, while also transgressing and violating the identities of individual users. We also find that people are developing self-organized practices in response to these transgressions and violations. We discuss the implications of algorithmic systems on people's identity work, and introduce the concept of algorithmic exclusion, and explore how people are building resilience following moments of algorithmic exclusion.

As Queer Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) becomes an established part of the larger field, both in terms of research on and with queer populations and in terms of employing queering theories and methods, the role of queer researchers has become a timely topic of discussion. However, these discussions have largely centered around member-researcher status and positionality when working with queer populations. Based on insights gathered at multiple ACM events over the past year, we identified two pressing issues: (1) we need to better support queer people doing HCI research not specific to queer populations, and (2) we need to identify how to best support member-researchers in leading Queer HCI while including collaborators beyond the queer community. This Special Interest Group (SIG) aims to directly address these challenges by convening a broad community of queer researchers and allies, working not only on explicitly-queer topics but across a broad range of HCI topics.

Online communities provide spaces for people who are vulnerable and underserved to seek support and build community, such as LGBTQ+ people. Today, some online community spaces are mediated by algorithms. Scholarship has found that algorithms have become deeply embedded in the systems that mediate our routine engagements with the world. Yet, little is known about how these systems impact those who are most vulnerable in society. In this paper, we focus on people's everyday experiences with one algorithmic system, the short video sharing application TikTok. TikTok recently received press that it was suppressing and oppressing the identities of its growing LGBTQ+ user population through algorithmic and human moderation of LGBTQ+ creators and content related to LGBTQ+ identity. Through an interview study with 16 LGBTQ+ TikTok users, we explore people's everyday engagements and encounters with the platform. We find that TikTok's For You Page algorithm constructs contradictory identity spaces that at once support LGBTQ+ identity work and reaffirm LGBTQ+ identity, while also transgressing and violating the identities of individual users. We also find that people are developing self-organized practices in response to these transgressions and violations. We discuss the implications of algorithmic systems on people's identity work, and introduce the concept of algorithmic exclusion, and explore how people are building resilience following moments of algorithmic exclusion.