Elephant in the Room: Dissecting and Reflecting on the Evolution of Online Social Network Research

This was the first time I attended ICWSM’25. Unfortunately, I liked it less than what I expected—due to its format.

A lot of papers had been accepted, and the organizers decided to make it as a single track event. This led to each paper having only 5 minutes to be presented. I find that such length is too short to deliver a strong impression to the audience—especially given the diverse range of topics covered in the conference.

Besides, some last-minute changes have been done to the organization of the presentations. As a speaker, I was told that I had 5 minutes which should have allowed Q&A, so I made my presentation to be 4-minute long. Then, at the conference, a change was made (likely because many speakers exceeded the 5-minute slot, and no time for Q&A was given). The change was debatable: at the end of each session, there was a “joint Q&A” involving all speakers of that session. However, this change was not done by reducing the time allowed for the talks, and the program was fixed—hence, this “joint Q&A” was extremely short (just 1,2 questions). As a result, some speakers received one question, while others did not receive any. I found this to be very unfair and almost embarassing towards those speakers that stood there without receiving any question.

My stance is that the conference could have been turned into a multi-track event (the venue clearly allowed this, space-wise) so that speakers could have more time for their presentations. This would have made everything better, both for the speakers (who could engage in a better Q&A, and had more time for their talk), and for the attendees (who could better appreciate the findings of any paper).

(I think I will write a post on my sentiment towards the current state of “conference presentations” sooner or later…)

Slides Venue Paper