Quantifying the relationship between specialisation and reputation in an online platform

TL;DR

This study analyzes how user specialization and reputation are related on Stack Overflow, revealing that specialists tend to have higher quality contributions, contrasting with traditional top-down environments.

Contribution

It provides a data-driven analysis of user behavior and reputation dynamics, highlighting the emergence of specialists and generalists over 11 years on Stack Overflow.

Findings

Specialists are more likely to post top answers.

User behavior self-organizes into specialists and generalists.

Specialization correlates with higher answer quality.

Abstract

Online platforms experience a tension between decentralisation and incentives to steer user behaviour, which are usually implemented through digital reputation systems. We provide a statistical characterisation of the user behaviour emerging from the interplay of such competing forces in Stack Overflow, a long-standing knowledge sharing platform. Over the 11 years covered by our analysis, we find that the platform's user base consistently self-organise into specialists and generalists, i.e., users who focus their activity on narrow and broad sets of topics, respectively. We relate the emergence of these behaviours to the platform's reputation system with a series of data-driven models, and find specialisation to be statistically associated with a higher ability to post the best answers to a question. Our findings are in stark contrast with observations made in top-down environments - such as firms and corporations - where generalist skills are consistently found to be more successful.