Designing Usable Controls for Customizable Social Media Feeds

Personalized recommendation algorithms deliver content to the user on most major social media platforms. While these algorithms are crucial for helping users find relevant content, users lack meaningful control over them. This reduces users' sense of agency and their ability to adapt social media feeds to their own needs and values. Efforts have been made to give users more control over their feeds, but usability remains a major barrier to adoption. Drawing upon prior work in designing teachable social media feeds, we built Pilot, a novel system of controls and feedback mechanisms on BlueSky that are expressive, intuitive, and integrated directly into the feed to allow users to customize their feed while they browse. Our user study suggests the system increases the user's sense of agency, and encourages them to think more critically about curating their feeds. We synthesize design implications for enhancing user agency over social media feeds.