Social Media Feed Elicitation

TL;DR

This paper introduces feed elicitation interviews, an interactive method that helps social media users better articulate their preferences for custom feeds, leading to more preferred and user-controlled social media experiences.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel interactive approach for eliciting user preferences to improve custom social media feeds using large language models.

Findings

Participants preferred feeds from elicited preferences over manual descriptions.

Feed elicitation improves user control over social media feeds.

The method effectively identifies gaps in user-defined feed preferences.

Abstract

Social media users have repeatedly advocated for control over the currently opaque operations of feed algorithms. Large language models (LLMs) now offer the promise of custom-defined feeds--but users often fail to foresee the gaps and edge cases in how they define their custom feed. We introduce feed elicitation interviews, an interactive method that guides users through identifying these gaps and articulating their preferences to better author custom social media feeds. We deploy this approach in an online study to create custom BlueSky feeds and find that participants significantly prefer the feeds produced from their elicited preferences to those produced by users manually describing their feeds. Through feed elicitation interviews, we advance users' ability to control their social media experience, empowering them to describe and implement their desired feeds.