Audience in the Loop: Viewer Feedback-Driven Content Creation in Micro-drama Production on Social Media

The popularization of social media has led to increasing consumption of narrative content in byte-sized formats. Such micro-dramas contain fast-pace action and emotional cliffs, particularly attractive to emerging Chinese markets in platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou. Content writers for micro-dramas must adapt to fast-pace, audience-directed workflows, but previous research has focused instead on examining writers'experiences of platform affordances or their perceptions of platform bias, rather than the step-by-step processes through which they actually write and iterative content. In 28 semi-structured interviews with scriptwriters and writers specialized in micro-dramas, we found that the short-turn-around workflow leads to writers taking on multiple roles simultaneously, iteratively adapting to storylines in response to real-time audience feedback in the form of comments, reposts, and memes. We identified unique narrative styles such as AI-generated micro-dramas and audience-responsive micro-dramas. This work reveals audience interaction as a new paradigm for collaborative creative processes on social media.