From Asking to Answering: Getting More Involved on Stack Overflow
Timur Bachschi, Aniko Hannak, Florian Lemmerich, Johannes Wachs

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,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsWikis in Education and Collaboration · Expert finding and Q&A systems · Open Source Software Innovations
