Form-From: A Design Space of Social Media Systems

TL;DR

This work aims to characterize and then distill a concise design space of social media systems that can help to understand similarities and differences, recognize potential consequences of design choice, and identify spaces for innovation.

Abstract

Social media systems are as varied as they are pervasive. They have been almost universally adopted for a broad range of purposes including work, entertainment, activism, and decision making. As a result, they have also diversified, with many distinct designs differing in content type, organization, delivery mechanism, access control, and many other dimensions. In this work, we aim to characterize and then distill a concise design space of social media systems that can help us understand similarities and differences, recognize potential consequences of design choices, and identify spaces for innovation. Our model, which we call Form-From, characterizes social media based on (1) the form of the content, either threaded or flat, and (2) from where or from whom one might receive content, ranging from spaces to networks to the commons. We derive Form-From inductively from a larger set of 62 dimensions organized into 10 categories. To demonstrate the utility of our model, we trace the history of social media systems as they traverse the Form-From space over time, and we identify common design patterns within cells of the model.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: The Form-From model describes social media designs along two main dimensions: (1) The form or shape that the content takes, either flat as in a chatroom or threaded as in individual posts with linked comments, and (2) 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.
• Figure 2: Johansen's time-space matrix johansen1988groupware and Grudin's time-space categorization grudin1994computer are two classic models of CSCW systems. They both split 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.
• Figure 3: 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.
• Figure 4: Examples of systems both old and current in each cell of the Form-From model.
• Figure 5: 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.