Tolulope Oshinowo present his MSE talk "Pantry: Reconceptualizing Social Media Feed Curation and Its Implications for User Agency" Wednesday, December 3, 2025 at 11:00am in CS 402.
Tolulope Oshinowo present his MSE talk "Pantry: Reconceptualizing Social Media Feed Curation and Its Implications for User Agency" Wednesday, December 3, 2025 at 11:00am in CS 402. Thesis adviser: Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Manoel Horta Ribeiro (reader) Abstract: Social media feeds are among the most influential yet opaque infrastructures of everyday life online, typically optimized for engagement rather than user agency. In response, we present Pantry, a mobile app that reconceptualizes feed curation around user-authored control and in-the-moment preference expression. To evaluate this approach, we conducted a study combining preliminary surveys, tracked user activity logs, and debrief interviews to examine how users engaged with and perceived a more intentional feed curation workflow. Overall, our findings suggest that user-authored feeds are a viable and welcomed alternative, but also raise questions about how far such designs should diverge from familiar social media interface conventions. As both a functional system and research contribution, Pantry advances ongoing HCI discussions by grounding largely theoretical conversations in practical implementation. In doing so, we provide a concrete foundation for examining how alternative feed architectures can redistribute agency, and invite further inquiry through systems-building.
participants (1)
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CS Grad Department