Friendliness Of Stack Overflow Towards Newbies
This study addresses the user experience for new programmers on a major Q&A platform, but it is incremental as it builds on existing analyses of online communities.
The paper analyzed Stack Overflow's effectiveness in helping new programmers, finding that questions with specific tags receive faster responses and that platform activity declined after 2013 but revived during the 2020 pandemic.
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.