In this project, we explore how the internal operational tensions of the YouTube platform impact and are reflected in the multi-platform behaviors of users engaged in the posting and viewing of bootleg Broadway recordings. This project uses digital traces of user behavior, including uploads, posts, comments, playlist construction, and posts on other platforms, as well as metadata that appears to have been provided by the platform itself, and other ephemera. We focus on a set of user behaviors intended to conceal the presence of bootleg recordings from nebulously defined platform enforcers while at the same time trying to make the same recordings accessible to or even promoting them to those looking to view them or discover new recordings. YouTube’s behavior regarding these bootlegs is inconsistent and opaque. Certain recordings disappear quickly, while others stay for years at a time. Some recordings are tagged with complete copyright holder and licensing information, even track listings, seemingly indicating an interaction with ContentID or another automated tagging system. Bootleg recordings may appear in the algorithmically-populated recommendations bar on the right side of the YouTube interface, only to be taken down within minutes of being recommended to users. The specific and sometimes contradictory behaviors, policies, and affordances of the YouTube platform have resulted in users adapting their behavior surrounding the exchange and sharing of these videos, resulting in new vocabularies, new standards and norms, and new derivative products.

This paper examines the development of digital subcultures and microtrends in a social media landscape increasingly driven by algorithms. We explore the increasing proliferation of subcultures defined by aesthetic categories which we refer to as “microtrends. In this paper we draw from a combined mixed-methods exploration– a visual discourse analysis taken in conjunction with critical technoculture analysis (CDTA) – of content shared to the popular hashtag #aesthetic across three different algorithmically driven social media platforms: TikTok, Instagram and Youtube. We aim to extend scholarship on digital subculture formation by examining the intersection of identity formation, algorithmic capitalism and user practices surrounding microtrends through the lens of user engagement and self identity guided by three central questions: (1) What tactics and practices constitute user participation in microtrends? (2) How does user engagement with microtrends function as an act of relational self expression? (3) What are user discourses surrounding microtrend participation? Three novel user practices are identified - aesthetic consistency, aesthetic anxiety, and aesthetic creation- which when taken together comprise of a process that we term “self-discretization” wherein users “do the work” of abstracting and fragmenting their identities for the sake of attaining visibility within a datafied digital environment. Ultimately this paper argues that in an increasingly algorithmic cultural landscape users begin to internalize not just the messaging, but also the logics of algorithmic capitalism and regimes of datafication.

A fast-growing international success, ByteDance’s short video platform TikTok is a relevant case study to examine how digital platforms expand infrastructurally and accumulate power. TikTok has achieved popularity comparable to major players, including Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. It now grapples with balancing the diverse interests of its different user groups, chief among which content creators. We interrogate how TikTok manages this challenge via an exploratory study that studies the platform’s evolution through what we dub ‘platform tools,’ or, the software-based instruments for cultural production on social media platforms. Such software-based tools have been previously theorized using the ‘boundary resources’ framework, which emerged from information systems studies. This framework conceptualizes platform tools as interrelated, contextual, and dynamic, changing in response to variables internal and external to the platform ecosystem. Recognizing that platform tools are ever-changing, we conduct a ‘platform historiography’ to periodize three main trends: platform tools (1) have contributed to the formalization and professionalization of platform content; (2) have encouraged the standardization of platform-dependent cultural production; and (3) have furthered the platformization of TikTok both within, as well as outside the cultural industries. Our paper serves as a response to calls from media scholars to view platforms as contingent and ever-evolving, and to further social media historiography. More specifically, we contribute to the literature on platform studies because it focuses on an understudied aspect of platform governance: platform tools.

‘Social media’ represent a dynamic technological environment, in which emerging platforms make use of comparisons to existing apps to construct their own reputation. This is the case of BeReal – a platform that allows users to share pictures once a day, and only when triggered by a notification. In this paper, I combine digital technography and the platform walkthrough method to examine how BeReal deploys antagonistic discourse towards dominant media to promise a more authentic experience. In so doing, I frame the platform as evoking, appropriating, and remediating (Bolter and Grusin 2000) notions of mediated liveness – not only when it comes to a promised ‘real-time’ connection but also referring to particular ways of ‘being there’, sharing experiences, and having ‘real’ experiences through technological mediation. This discussion matters because it demonstrates how claims of immediacy and of a direct access to ‘reality’ are manifested and negotiated in contemporary sociotechnical practices. In this context, BeReal’s version for “platformized authenticity” – the co-option of ‘the authentic’ to advance platforms’ growth and commercial goals – is a process marked by a recursive, cyclical negotiation between technical mediation and claims of liveness.