💜 This is a collaborative work with a wonderful team: @tskuo.bsky.social, Sophia Liu, @cqz.bsky.social, @josephseering.bsky.social, @axz.bsky.social, @haiyizhu.bsky.social, @kenholstein.bsky.social
📜 Check our paper for more details: www.arxiv.org/abs/2509.25492
12/ During a field deployment across six Discord communities, Botender supported community members in tailoring bot behavior to their specific needs, showcasing the usefulness of case-based provocations in facilitating collaborative bot design.
11/ Our validation study found these provocations more useful than standard test cases for revealing improvement opportunities and surfacing disagreements.
10/ Botender presents case-based provocations to community members throughout the bot design process.
This helps them collaboratively iterate on the bot’s prompts, review its behavior in specific cases based on these changes, and decide whether to deploy the proposed change.
9/ Botender generates these provocations to surface opportunities for prompt improvement, based on common issues in novice-authored prompts.
In turn, these cases are also useful in surfacing differing viewpoints about desirable bot behavior within a community.
8/ To support this collaborative design process, we introduce 🔥case-based provocations🔥:
Concrete interaction scenarios that are algorithmically generated to spark collective reflection and discussion about desirable bot behavior, rather than simply validating expected outcomes.
Botender screenshot
7/ To address these challenges, we present Botender, a system that supports communities in collaboratively designing LLM-powered bots that reflect their specific needs.
With Botender, community members can directly propose, iterate on, and deploy custom bot behaviors on their community platform.
6/ Second, without a coordinated process, differing opinions among community members on how bots should behave can lead to difficulties in achieving consensus and effective collaboration.
5/ First, non-AI experts often focus narrowly on editing LLM prompts for a single interaction scenario, failing to account for unintended bot behavior in other relevant scenarios.
4/ Recently, LLMs have lowered the technical barriers to designing AI agents, allowing communities to shape the behavior of LLM-powered bots using natural language, without relying on external developers.
However, several challenges exist:
3/ This misalignment occurs because third-party bots typically offer limited customization options.
Meanwhile, developers lack the community-specific knowledge and capacity to address tailored requests over time.
2/ AI agents, or bots, play diverse and important roles in community governance across online platforms.
However, many communities rely on third-party bots developed by outsiders that misalign with their specific needs.
Botender helps communities iteratively align their AI agents with their collective intents through case-based provocations.
🔮 How can we empower online communities to design AI agents tailored to their unique needs and norms?
In our #CHI2026 paper, we introduce #Botender, a system that enables collaborative design of AI agents through 🔥case-based provocation🔥
That’s so exciting! Congrats, Joel!! 🥳
This is such a beautiful piece by @liao.shen-yi.org abt media portrayals of Taiwan + how Taiwan is constructed in political / intellectual discourse. Pocketing it to periodically send to people, esp those who want to talk to me about Thailand :)
liao.shen-yi.org/posts/stop-m...
CSCW folks, I wanted to highlight how excited and proud I am to see work from our community (dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/..., CSCW '24 best paper winner led by @jiachenyan.bsky.social and @mlam.bsky.social) grow and expand ambition into this Science paper. CSCW has a ton to offer the world.
Really excited about this 🔔new paper🔔 where we had a chance to leverage Change.org 's staggered rollout of a "write with AI" tool to causally (aka "once and for all") measure the impact of such tools on global platform outcomes. Summary: with AI, petition length ⬆️, homogeneity ⬆️, Outcomes ⬇️. More:
X turned on account location, and immediately turned it off again--because it showed that your "farmer in Michigan" is really a paid troll in Bangladesh. We need a social network that shows where content is from.
asbruckman.medium.com/x-added-acco...
With cites to @katestarbird.bsky.social
The UW Center for an Informed Public is looking for postdocs (for 2026-2028) from across diverse disciplines whose research sheds light on the challenges of our modern information environment, promotes civic health, and/or helps people/communities navigate online spaces: apply.interfolio.com/177901
Just arrived in Bergen for CSCW, where I'll present Venire! Venire is a Reddit moderation tool that uses an ML model trained on mod decision histories to identify controversial cases. It preempts inconsistent decision-making by flagging these cases for multi-mod review
dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
Call for Enrollment CHI 2026 Student Volunteer Application Period Oct 15 2025 - Jan 23 2026
I'm excited to serve as an SV co-chair for #CHI2026!
Interested in joining us? Apply now to become an SV! It's a fantastic opportunity to make new friends and help create an unforgettable @chi.acm.org experience.
Check out the application link below:
I'm headed to #UIST2025 🇰🇷 to present our 🏆 Best Paper (!!!), "Graffiti: Enabling an Ecosystem of Personalized and Interoperable Social Applications"
@karger.bsky.social and David Clark
doi.org/10.1145/3746...
LLM safety work often reasons over high-level policies (be helpful & polite), but must tackle on-the-ground cases (unsolicited money advice when stocks are mentioned). This can feel like driving on an unfamiliar road guided by a generic driver’s manual instead of a map. We introduce: Policy Maps 🗺️
Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Graduate Application Support Program. Apply by October 13, 2025.
🌟 If you’re applying to CMU SCS PhD programs, and come from a background that would bring additional dimensions to the CMU community, our PhD students are here to help!
Apply to the Graduate Applicant Support Program by Oct 13 to receive feedback on your application materials:
Social media feeds today are optimized for engagement, often leading to misalignment between users' intentions and technology use.
In a new paper, we introduce Bonsai, a tool to create feeds based on stated preferences, rather than predicted engagement.
arxiv.org/abs/2509.10776
Crunching away on a paper for #CHI2026 about online communities, moderation, or sociolinguistics?
You may be want to check out recent work led by
@galenweld.bsky.social on predicting SOVC within subreddits based on the style and structure of conversations.
arxiv.org/abs/2508.08596
The @acm-cscw.bsky.social Starter Pack is growing ahead of #CSCW2025 ! (go.bsky.app/SPumuMT) 🔥 A warm welcome to all of our new members 🔥: @imanm02.bsky.social
@jesanovi.bsky.social @shadinz.bsky.social @jaytee-ess.bsky.social @jaewonk.bsky.social @sypark9.bsky.social
New member thread 1/x
The image is titled Workshop on Algorithmic Collective Action. On the left are speakers, Tijana Zrnic, Incoming Assistant Professor, Stanford University, Seda Gürses, Associate Professor, TU Delft, lorian Tramèr, Assistant Professor, ETH Zürich, Alex Hanna, Director of Research, Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), Joanna Redden, Associate Professor, Western University, and Saiph Savage, Assistant Professor, Northeastern University. The abstract reads: The study of “collective action” has a long history in Economics and Sociology as a way for groups of people to impact markets and the political arena (Olson 1965; Marwell and Oliver 1993). Algorithmic Collective Action (ACA) is the study of such coordination strategies in algorithmically-mediated sociotechnical systems. Our workshop offers a platform to discuss new ideas and help define the foundational research directions for the emerging topic through interdisciplinary discussions between ML researchers, scholars from the social sciences, community stakeholders and advocates.
We are organizing a workshop on Algorithmic Collective Action at NeurIPS this year. As AI continues to concentrate power, we will meet in San Diego (Dec 6 or 7) for critical conversations on user coordination, labor, data protection, and community advocacy.
Submissions due August 22.
#NeurIPS2025
