An Empirical Study on Neophytes of Stack Overflow: How Welcoming the Community is towards Them

Abdullah Al Jobair, Suzad Mohammad, Zahin Maisha, Md. Mostafa, Md. Haque

2022

Abstract

Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question and answers (Q&A) platform for programmers with a rapidly expanding community of new users. However, the unwelcoming environment towards new users has been under discussion for several years, which is a major concern towards the enhancement of a skillful community. In this work, we study a specific group of users who are either registered in the last 45 days or have a reputation less than or equal to 50 and term them as “neophytes”. We investigate whether neophytes actually face hurdles while collaborating in Stack Overflow and, if so, identify the reasons behind this phenomenon by qualitative and quantitative analysis. Our study finds that neophytes are indeed facing hurdles while collaborating in the platform. The reasons behind the hurdles include harsh moderation of posts, negligence of the posts, deleting or closing of posts, downvoting without providing any proper reasoning, etc. Our findings can provide guidelines to create a more user-friendly Stack Overflow community. Furthermore, this study can guide researchers to observe the reactions of neophytes in adverse situations and recommend some steps for the community to make positive changes to the Stack Overflow environment.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Al Jobair A., Mohammad S., Maisha Z., Mostafa M. and Haque M. (2022). An Empirical Study on Neophytes of Stack Overflow: How Welcoming the Community is towards Them. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-758-568-5, pages 197-208. DOI: 10.5220/0011081100003176

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase22,
author={Abdullah Al Jobair and Suzad Mohammad and Zahin Maisha and Md. Mostafa and Md. Haque},
title={An Empirical Study on Neophytes of Stack Overflow: How Welcoming the Community is towards Them},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2022},
pages={197-208},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011081100003176},
isbn={978-989-758-568-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - An Empirical Study on Neophytes of Stack Overflow: How Welcoming the Community is towards Them
SN - 978-989-758-568-5
AU - Al Jobair A.
AU - Mohammad S.
AU - Maisha Z.
AU - Mostafa M.
AU - Haque M.
PY - 2022
SP - 197
EP - 208
DO - 10.5220/0011081100003176