Friendliness Of Stack Overflow Towards Newbies

TL;DR

This study evaluates how effectively Stack Overflow supports new programmers, analyzing user journeys, response times for tagged questions, and platform activity trends over time, including recent pandemic-related growth.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of user progression, response dynamics based on question tags, and platform activity trends, highlighting areas of strength and decline.

Findings

New users take up to 12 months to transition from newbies.

Questions with certain tags receive faster responses.

Platform activity declined after 2013 but increased during the pandemic.

Abstract

In today's modern digital world, we have a number of online Question and Answer platforms like Stack Exchange, Quora, and GFG that serve as a medium for people to communicate and help each other. In this paper, we analyzed the effectiveness of Stack Overflow in helping newbies to programming. Every user on this platform goes through a journey. For the first 12 months, we consider them to be a newbie. Post 12 months they come under one of the following categories: Experienced, Lurkers, or Inquisitive. Each question asked has tags assigned to it and we observe that questions with some specific tags have a faster response time indicating an active community in that field over others. The platform had a steady growth up to 2013 after which it started declining, but recently during the pandemic 2020, we can see rejuvenated activity on the platform.