research-article

Design lessons from the fastest q&a site in the west

Authors:

George Hripcsak,

Björn HartmannAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 2857 - 2866

https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979366

Published: 07 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

This paper analyzes a Question & Answer site for programmers, Stack Overflow, that dramatically improves on the utility and performance of Q&A systems for technical domains. Over 92% of Stack Overflow questions about expert topics are answered - in a median time of 11 minutes. Using a mixed methods approach that combines statistical data analysis with user interviews, we seek to understand this success. We argue that it is not primarily due to an a priori superior technical design, but also to the high visibility and daily involvement of the design team within the community they serve. This model of continued community leadership presents challenges to both CSCW systems research as well as to attempts to apply the Stack Overflow model to other specialized knowledge domains.

References

[1]

Ackerman, M. S. and Malone, T. W. Answer Garden: a tool for growing organizational memory. Proceedings of the ACM SIGOIS and IEEE CS TC-OA conference on Office information systems, ACM (1990), 31--39.

Digital Library

[2]

Adamic, L. A., Zhang, J., Bakshy, E., and Ackerman, M. S. Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something. Proceeding of WWW 2008, ACM (2008), 665--674.

Digital Library

[3]

Barcellini, F., D&#233;tienne, F., Burkhardt, J., and Sack, W. Thematic coherence and quotation practices in OSS design-oriented online discussions. Proceedings of GROUP 2005, ACM (2005), 177--186.

Digital Library

[4]

Bouguessa, M., Dumoulin, B., and Wang, S. Identifying authoritative actors in question-answering forums: the case of Yahoo! answers. Proceeding of ACM SIGKDD 2008, ACM (2008), 866--874.

Digital Library

[5]

Brandt, J., Dontcheva, M., Weskamp, M., and Klemmer, S. R. Example-centric programming: integrating web search into the development environment. Proceedings of CHI 2010, ACM (2010), 513--522.

Digital Library

[6]

Brooks, F. P. The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist. Addison-Wesley Professional 2010.

Digital Library

[7]

Corbin, J. and Strauss, A. C. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. Sage Publications, Inc, 2007.

[8]

Dearman, D. and Truong, K. N. Why users of Yahoo! Answers do not answer questions. Proceedings of CHI 2010, ACM (2010), 329--332.

Digital Library

[9]

Grudin, J. Groupware and social dynamics: eight challenges for developers. Communications of the ACM 37, 1 (1994), 92--105.

Digital Library

[10]

Gy&#246;ngyi, Z., Koutrika, G., Pedersen, J., and Garcia-Molina, H. Questioning Yahoo! Answers. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Question Answering on the Web (at WWW 2008), (2008).

[11]

Harper, F. M., Moy, D., and Konstan, J. A. Facts or friends?: distinguishing informational and conversational questions in social Q&#38;A sites. Proceedings of CHI 2009, ACM (2009), 759--768.

Digital Library

[12]

Hartmann, B., MacDougall, D., Brandt, J., and Klemmer, S. R. What would other programmers do: suggesting solutions to error messages. Proceedings of CHI 2010, ACM (2010), 1019--1028.

Digital Library

[13]

Horowitz, D. and Kamvar, S. D. The anatomy of a large-scale social search engine. Proceedings of WWW 2010, ACM (2010), 431--440.

Digital Library

[14]

Hsieh, G. and Counts, S. mimir: a market-based real-time question and answer service. Proceedings of CHI 2009, ACM (2009), 769--778.

Digital Library

[15]

Hsieh, G., Kraut, R. E., and Hudson, S. E. Why pay? Exploring how financial incentives are used for question &#38; answer. Proceedings of CHI 2010, ACM (2010), 305--314.

Digital Library

[16]

Kleinberg, J. M. Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. Journal of the ACM 46/5, 1999, 604--632.

Digital Library

[17]

Konstan, J. A., Miller, B. N., Maltz, D., Herlocker, J. L., Gordon, L. R., and Riedl, J. GroupLens: applying collaborative filtering to Usenet news. Communications of the ACM 40, 1997, 77--87.

Digital Library

[18]

Kumar, R., Lifshits, Y., and Tomkins, A. Evolution of two-sided markets. Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Web search and data mining, ACM (2010), 311--320.

Digital Library

[19]

Lampe, C. and Resnick, P. Slash(dot) and burn: distributed moderation in a large online conversation space. Proceedings of CHI 2004, ACM (2004), 543--550.

Digital Library

[20]

Morris, M. R., Teevan, J., and Panovich, K. What do people ask their social networks, and why?: a survey study of status message q&#38;a behavior. Proceedings of CHI 2010, ACM (2010), 1739--1748.

Digital Library

[21]

Nam, K. K., Ackerman, M. S., and Adamic, L. A. Questions in, knowledge in? A study of Naver's question answering community. Proceedings of CHI 2009, ACM (2009), 779--788.

Digital Library

[22]

Oktay, H., Taylor, B. J., and Jensen, D. D. Causal Discovery in Social Media Using Quasi-Experimental Designs. Proceedings of the ACM/SIGKDD Workshop on Social Media Analytics, (2010).

Digital Library

[23]

Raban, D. R. and Harper, F. M. Motivations for Answering Questions Online Abstract. New Media and Innovative Technologies, (2008).

[24]

Raymond, E. S. Homesteading the Noosphere. In The Cathedral and the Bazaar. O'Reilly, 1999.

Digital Library

[25]

Rodrigues, E. M. and Milic-Frayling, N. Socializing or knowledge sharing? Characterizing social intent in community question answering. Proceedings of CHI 2009, ACM (2009), 1127--1136.

Digital Library

[26]

Torrey, C., Churchill, E. F., and McDonald, D. W. Learning how: the search for craft knowledge on the internet. Proceedings of CHI 2009, ACM (2009), 1371--1380.

Digital Library

[27]

Zhang, J., Ackerman, M. S., and Adamic, L. Expertise networks in online communities: structure and algorithms. Proceedings of WWW 2007, ACM (2007), 221--230.

Digital Library

Cited By

Cheng RWang RZimmermann TFord D(2024)“It would work for me too”: How Online Communities Shape Software Developers’ Trust in AI-Powered Code Generation ToolsACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems10.1145/365199014:2(1-39)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651990
Kabir SUdo-Imeh DKou BZhang T(2024)Is Stack Overflow Obsolete? An Empirical Study of the Characteristics of ChatGPT Answers to Stack Overflow QuestionsProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642596(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642596
Kuo THalfaker ACheng ZKim JWu MWu THolstein KZhu H(2024)Wikibench: Community-Driven Data Curation for AI Evaluation on WikipediaProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642278(1-24)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642278
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Design lessons from the fastest q&a site in the west
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
  2. Human computer interaction (HCI)
2. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

Recommendations

A user activity-based measurement study characterizing and classifying Stack Exchange communities across multiple domains
CODS '17: Proceedings of the 4th ACM IKDD Conferences on Data Sciences

In recent times, Question-Answer communities have engaged much user attention and have become a major platform for knowledge sharing and discussion. Stack Exchange (SE) is one such successful community which is a collection of various domain-specific ...
Learning to be a better Q'er in social Q&A sites: social norms and information artifacts
ASIST '13: Proceedings of the 76th ASIS&T Annual Meeting: Beyond the Cloud: Rethinking Information Boundaries

Social question and answer sites (SQAs) are increasingly popular knowledge sharing platforms. In this paper, we outline how an SQA site functions as a social learning community. The success of an SQA site depends not only on effectively organizing and ...
Why users of yahoo!: answers do not answer questions
CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Posing a question to an online question and answer community does not guarantee a response. Significant prior work has explored and identified members' motivations for contributing to communities of collective action (e.g., Yahoo! Answers); in contrast ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 2011

3530 pages

ISBN:9781450302289

DOI:10.1145/1978942

General Chair:
Desney Tan
Microsoft Research
,
Program Chairs:
Geraldine Fitzpatrick
Vienna University of Technology
,
Carl Gutwin
University of Saskatchewan
,
Bo Begole
PARC
,
Wendy A. Kellogg
IBM Research

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 May 2011

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CHI '11

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CHI '11: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 7 - 12, 2011

BC, Vancouver, Canada

Acceptance Rates

CHI '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 410 of 1,532 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

344
Total Citations
View Citations
2,537
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)109
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)10

Reflects downloads up to 14 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Cheng RWang RZimmermann TFord D(2024)“It would work for me too”: How Online Communities Shape Software Developers’ Trust in AI-Powered Code Generation ToolsACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems10.1145/365199014:2(1-39)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651990
Kabir SUdo-Imeh DKou BZhang T(2024)Is Stack Overflow Obsolete? An Empirical Study of the Characteristics of ChatGPT Answers to Stack Overflow QuestionsProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642596(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642596
Kuo THalfaker ACheng ZKim JWu MWu THolstein KZhu H(2024)Wikibench: Community-Driven Data Curation for AI Evaluation on WikipediaProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642278(1-24)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642278
Zhang YWu YChen TWang TLiu HWang HRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)How do Developers Talk about GitHub Actions? Evidence from Online Software Development CommunityProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3623327(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3623327
Liang JYang CMyers BRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)A Large-Scale Survey on the Usability of AI Programming Assistants: Successes and ChallengesProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3608128(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3608128
Fu H(2024)Navigating the inception stage in online peer production communities: a comparative study on community building activities, user roles and interaction dynamicsOnline Information Review10.1108/OIR-07-2023-0360Online publication date: 11-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-07-2023-0360
Alanazi AAlfayez R(2024)What is discussed about Flutter on Stack Overflow (SO) question-and-answer (Q&A) website: An empirical studyJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.112089(112089)Online publication date: May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112089
Chen XXu FHuang YZhou XZheng Z(2024)An empirical study of code reuse between GitHub and stack overflow during software developmentJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2024.111964210(111964)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.111964
Sedhain ADiwanji VSolomon HLeon SKuttal S(2024)Developers’ information seeking in Question & Answer websites through a gender lensJournal of Computer Languages10.1016/j.cola.2024.10126779(101267)Online publication date: Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2024.101267
Vargo ATag BBlakely CKise K(2023)Poverty Traps in Online Knowledge-Based Peer-Production CommunitiesInformatics10.3390/informatics1003006110:3(61)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics10030061
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents