On the Feasibility of Predicting Questions being Forgotten in Stack Overflow

TL;DR

This paper investigates the feasibility of predicting questions on Stack Overflow that will become irrelevant over time, analyzing data from over a decade and finding meta-information more useful than text features for prediction.

Contribution

It introduces a study on predicting question forgetting in Stack Overflow, highlighting the importance of meta-information over text features for this task.

Findings

Meta-information is more predictive than text features.

Certain question categories are more predictable.

Analysis covers over 18 million questions from 2008 to 2019.

Abstract

For their attractiveness, comprehensiveness and dynamic coverage of relevant topics, community-based question answering sites such as Stack Overflow heavily rely on the engagement of their communities: Questions on new technologies, technology features as well as technology versions come up and have to be answered as technology evolves (and as community members gather experience with it). At the same time, other questions cease in importance over time, finally becoming irrelevant to users. Beyond filtering low-quality questions, "forgetting" questions, which have become redundant, is an important step for keeping the Stack Overflow content concise and useful. In this work, we study this managed forgetting task for Stack Overflow. Our work is based on data from more than a decade (2008 - 2019) - covering 18.1M questions, that are made publicly available by the site itself. For establishing a deeper understanding, we first analyze and characterize the set of questions about to be forgotten, i.e., questions that get a considerable number of views in the current period but become unattractive in the near future. Subsequently, we examine the capability of a wide range of features in predicting such forgotten questions in different categories. We find some categories in which those questions are more predictable. We also discover that the text-based features are surprisingly not helpful in this prediction task, while the meta information is much more predictive.