An Empirical Study on Neophytes of Stack Overflow: How Welcoming the Community is Towards Them

Abstract

Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular question and answers (Q&A) platform for programmers with a rapidly expanding community of new users. However, the unwelcoming environment towards new users has been under discussion for several years which is a major concern and hindrance towards the enhancement of a skillful community. In this work, we study a specific group of users who are either registered in the last 45 days or have a reputation less than or equal to 50 and term them as "neophytes". Upon establishing significance of the definition of neophytes, we perform manual analysis of neophytes' posts. We organize our research work into two research questions where we investigate whether neophytes actually face hurdles while collaborating in Stack Overflow and, if so, identify the potential reasons behind this phenomenon by qualitative and quantitative analysis. Our study finds that neophytes are indeed facing hurdles while collaborating in the platform. The reasons behind the hurdles include harsh moderation of posts, negligence of the posts, deleting or closing of posts, downvoting without providing any proper reasoning, etc. Our findings can provide guidelines to create a more user-friendly SO community. Furthermore, this study can guide researchers to observe the reactions of neophytes in adverse situations and recommend some steps for the community to make positive changes to the Stack Overflow environment.