From Asking to Answering: Getting More Involved on Stack Overflow

TL;DR

This paper examines the barriers preventing new users on Stack Overflow from becoming active answerers, highlighting individual and community factors that influence user engagement and contribution progression.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of factors affecting user transition from asking to answering on Stack Overflow, including social and demographic influences.

Findings

Many active users never post answers

User tenure, gender, and location influence answering likelihood

Community size and negative feedback impact user engagement

Abstract

Online knowledge platforms such as Stack Overflow and Wikipedia rely on a large and diverse contributor community. Despite efforts to facilitate onboarding of new users, relatively few users become core contributors, suggesting the existence of barriers or hurdles that hinder full involvement in the community. This paper investigates such issues on Stack Overflow, a widely popular question and answer community for computer programming. We document evidence of a "leaky pipeline", specifically that there are many active users on the platform who never post an answer. Using this as a starting point, we investigate potential factors that can be linked to the transition of new contributors from asking questions to posting answers. We find a user's individual features, such as their tenure, gender, and geographic location, as well as features of the subcommunity in which they are most active, such as its size and the prevalence of negative social feedback, have a significant relationship with their likelihood to post answers. By measuring and modeling these relationships our paper presents a first look at the challenges and obstacles to user promotion along the pipeline of contributions in online communities.