It’s also interesting how the community isn’t sustained through driving connections/interactions with other people directly, but rather, through creating a collective online space for personal growth and thinking. It’s nice to recognize that a strong sense of community can be shared without necessarily having direct interactions with one another.

Overall this was a really well-written case study that raised compelling questions for me about what constitutes an online community and how different design decisions can nourish a healthy one. (It also made me nostalgic because I, too, used to read Rookie!)

I also appreciated how thoughtfully technical decisions were made, such as using attribute-based encryption. In addition, the fact that the tool might actually deter bad actors for using it for covert communication — in having a public awareness raising component — speaks to the nuanced design decisions that went into really making it a tool for activists.

I agree that a major challenge could be the nature of Facebook’s News Feed, in which encrypted content could very well be deprioritized. So I echo the feedback in class that incorporating some kind of visual component to the encrypted posts might make it more compelling and perhaps even address this News Feed content prioritization issue.

Overall a really exciting project, and it’s awesome that you were able to build a working prototype. (Also, I love the origin of the name!).

One thought I had was that the negative implications of echo chambers and bad actors aren’t as clear on platforms like Spotify (vs. platforms like Facebook). But I do wonder about other implications for the field of music curation — specifically for “expert” curators, like DJs. Would their jobs become obsolete as everyone becomes their own DJ? Or would this change what kinds of music become influential?

Overall a creative and well-researched project (and love the idea of the class Spotify playlist!).

The notion of incorporating the credit system into things like basketball rentals was really compelling. My only question around this is how users might be able to “game” a system like this. How might you prevent users from being dishonest or doing things just to gain credits?

Overall, I thought this project did a great job of focusing on an existing community and identifying opportunities to foster both online and offline connections in the basketball community!

I also think the work you did to test the tool in practice was great. Even though you weren’t able to test the tool as much directly in r/dataisbeautiful, I thought the workaround of creating your own subreddit and conducting usability tests there was great. I am curious about a before/after comparison of how participants felt or engaged differently using vizdat vs. without using vizdat.

It’s been awesome to see this project come together — it’s a really well-thought tool and hope it might game some traction in the data viz community! I could also see vizdat being really useful in educational settings, perhaps also in communities like Stack Exchange, where people might go to more directly ask questions and seek help around creating data visualizations. I also love the future idea of using a game to publicize and test the tool in existing data viz subreddits.

For even more scoping, I think it could also be helpful to decide on a specific news site that you would want to implement a solution for — this could help you hone in on the audience. For example, Buzzfeed is a pretty different kind of news site with a different audience from a site like The Wall Street Journal.

I’m excited to see where this goes!