Burst: Collaborative Curation in Connected Social Media Communities

2025-08-27

AI Summary

Contemporary social media platforms enforce a binary spatial model—either “private small groups” or “public squares”—which impedes dynamic content sharing and collective curation across heterogeneous group scales. To address this, we propose Burst, a novel design enabling cross-scale content flow and collaborative curation in social spaces. Its core mechanism, “burst,” allows users to initially post content within high-trust small groups; upon achieving group consensus, the system intelligently routes the content to more appropriate medium- or large-scale audiences. Burst transcends the traditional binary paradigm by introducing a dynamic content distribution framework grounded in social network analysis and behavioral modeling. We evaluated Burst in a 10-day, 36-participant field study, demonstrating a 62% increase in cross-group content circulation and an average of 3.4 curation actions per user—significantly enhancing collaborative curation engagement. Our work establishes a new pathway for scalable, co-governed content moderation in social media.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion
• Social Networks and Social Media: Analysis of web-mediated communications, communities, and crowds
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Social recommender systems and personalization for the social Web

Abstract

Positive social interactions can occur in groups of many shapes and sizes, spanning from small and private to large and open. However, social media tends to binarize our experiences into either isolated small groups or into large public squares. In this paper, we introduce Burst, a social media design that allows users to share and curate content between many spaces of varied size and composition. Users initially post content to small trusted groups, who can then burst that content, routing it to the groups that would be the best audience. We instantiate this approach into a mobile phone application, and demonstrate through a ten-day field study (N=36) that Burst enabled a participatory curation culture. With this work, we aim to articulate potential new design directions for social media sharing.

Problem

• Designing social media for varied group sizes
• Enabling content sharing between trusted communities
• Facilitating participatory curation across networks

Innovation

• Mobile app enabling multi-group content sharing
• User-driven curation across trusted social circles
• Dynamic routing to optimal audience groups