Popularity and discourse in tech-related online communities

Tech-related online communities on GitHub, Reddit, and Stack Overflow are an invaluable resource for software engineers, allowing them to find solutions to problems and connect with other professionals. Much of the discourse on these platforms is conducted using commenting mechanisms in which one user responds to content posted by another user. Even though these communities lack formal organizational structures, these technologists are often followed by other software developers who monitor their posts; users who regularly post useful solutions are recognized using platform-specific mechanisms such as stars or karma points. This article investigates the relationship between popularity and discourse in tech-related online communities. To do this, we create comment timelines from sequences of user interactions and extract commenting networks from comment response patterns. We study how the popularity of the post authors and other commenters shapes community interaction. Although there are some commonalities, there are distinct differences between the commenting behavior of GitHub users vs. Reddit and Stack Overflow. Popularity influences the length of commenting timelines on GitHub, whereas this effect isn’t observed on Reddit or Stack Overflow. However on all three platforms, user seniority appears to have a stronger impact on the structure of commenting networks than popularity. By understanding how popularity affects user interactions, we can design online communities that are more effective at supporting knowledge sharing and problem solving. Our cross-platform comment dataset is available for download at: https://bit.ly/abdul-dissertation-dataset.