The Age of Snippet Programming: Toward Understanding Developer Communities in Stack Overflow and Reddit
Abstract: Today, coding skills are among the most required competencies worldwide, often also for non-computer scientists. Because of this trend, community contribution-based, question-and-answer (Q&A) platforms became prominent for finding the proper solution to all programming issues. Stack Overflow has been the most popular platform for technical-related questions for years. Still, recently, some programming-related subreddits of Reddit have become a standing stone for questions and discussions. This work investigates the developers’ behavior and community formation around the twenty most popular programming languages. We examined two consecutive years of programming-related questions from Stack Overflow and Reddit, performing a longitudinal study on users’ posting activity and their high-order interaction patterns abstracted via hypergraphs. Our analysis highlighted crucial differences in how these Q&A platforms are utilized by their users. In line with previous literature, it emphasized the constant decline of Stack Overflow in favor of more community-friendly platforms, such as Reddit, which has been growing rapidly lately.
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