Abstract
Question and answer (Q&A) websites are a medium where people can communicate and help each other. Stack Overflow is one of the most popular Q&A websites about programming, where millions of developers seek help or provide valuable assistance. Activity on the Stack Overflow website is moderated by the user community, utilizing a voting system to promote high quality content. The website was created on 2008 and has accumulated a large amount of crowd wisdom about the software development industry. Here we analyse this data to examine trends in the grouping of technologies and their users into different sub-communities. In our work we analysed all questions, answers, votes and tags from Stack Overflow between 2008 and 2020. We generated a series of user-technology interaction graphs and applied community detection algorithms to identify the biggest user communities for each year, to examine which technologies those communities incorporate, how they are interconnected and how they evolve through time. The biggest and most persistent communities were related to web development. In general, there is little movement between communities; users tend to either stay within the same community or not acquire any score at all. Community evolution reveals the popularity of different programming languages and frameworks on Stack Overflow over time. These findings give insight into the user community on Stack Overflow and reveal long-term trends on the software development industry.
Highlights
The software and computing industries change rapidly as new technologies and platforms are introduced
The reasons behind the drop in activity after 2014 are out of the scope of our work, but a possible reason is the creation at that time of the Stack Overflow Meta community
Stack Overflow Meta is a forum where users discuss the workings and policies of Stack Overflow, rather than discussing programming itself. It is separated from the main question-and-answer site to reduce noise, while providing a legitimate space for people to ask how and why the Stack Overflow site works the way it does
Summary
The software and computing industries change rapidly as new technologies and platforms are introduced. The sharing and re-use of code via platforms such as GitHub(https://github.com/), Bitbucket (https://bitbucket.org), and Source Forge (https://sourceforge.net/) enable more effective collaboration, while the easy availability of programming expertise online on sites such as Stack Overflow (https://stackoverflow.com/) and Quora (https://www.quora.com) has changed how individuals seek help with programming challenges. Whereas once an individual might seek an answer in a text book or from an office colleague, it has become the norm to seek help online. Stack Overflow is a self-moderating online Question & Answer forum. Stack Overflow questions are generally hard, requiring expertise and domain knowledge to provide a good answer. As a result of this self-regulation, content on Stack Overflow tends to be of high quality
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