Michael Bernstein

@mbernst.bsky.social

3366 Followers 297 Following

CS Professor at Stanford

screenshot of the title and authors of the Science paper that are linked in the next post
A video of me deleting "Associate" from my title so I am now Professor of Computer Science.
Book cover of the Flash Teams book. "Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-enhanced, on-demand work". A lightning bolt image made out of square pixels.
A series of cars parked next to a sign that says "Permit restricted parking area. Violators will be cited." Violators will be cited is highlighted in red.
A screenshot of the CRA website listing Helena's award. Full text in the CRA link.
The Form-From model (left), the focus of our paper, is a distillation of a larger design space that we articulated and synthesized through our inductive process. We began with a review of systems and platforms to produce a large, maximal model that articulates 62 dimensions that we considered salient (right). We then iteratively grouped those dimensions hierarchically into 11 categories (middle), and finally selected and distilled them into two dimensions for Form-From.
Example screenshots including Slack, Reddit, Friendster, LiveJournal, Pinterest, TikTok, all split by the Form-From axes. (Order: flat to threaded, spaces to network to commons)
Johansen's time-space matrix is a classic model of CSCW systems. It splits the design space by whether the people are interacting synchronously or asynchronously, and by whether people are in the same physical location. Most modern social media systems fall into the same ``different time--different place'' cell of these models.
Social media systems followed a pattern over time of moving from flat spaces (e.g., Talkomatic), to threaded spaces (e.g., Usenet), to flat networks (e.g., the original Facebook), to threaded networks (e.g., Reddit), to threaded commons (e.g., TikTok). This path does not describe every system---it describes an overall pattern.
The Form-From model describes social media designs along two main dimensions: (1)~The \textit{form} or shape that the content takes, either flat as in a chatroom or threaded as in individual posts with linked comments, and (2)~\textit{from} where a user receives content, as from spaces such as channels, from networks such as a friend graph, or from a platform-wide commons such as an algorithmic For You page. For simplicity, examples in this figure are coded as of their design at their initial launch.