How modern news aggregators help development communities shape and share knowledge

Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Publication Date

6-2018

Abstract

Many developers rely on modern news aggregator sites such as Reddit and Hacker News to stay up to date with the latest technological developments and trends. In order to understand what motivates developers to contribute, what kind of content is shared, and how knowledge is shaped by the community, we interviewed and surveyed developers that participate on the Reddit programming subreddit and we analyzed a sample of posts on both Reddit and Hacker News. We learned what kind of content is shared in these websites and developer motivations for posting, sharing, discussing, evaluating, and aggregating knowledge on these aggregators, while revealing challenges developers face in terms of how content and participant behavior is moderated. Our insights aim to improve the practices developers follow when using news aggregators, as well as guide tool makers on how to improve their tools. Our findings are also relevant to researchers that study developer communities of practice.

Keywords

News aggregators, development communities, knowledge sharing

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

ICSE '18: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceeedings: Gothenburg, Sweden, May 27 - June 3

First Page

499

Last Page

510

ISBN

9781450356633

Identifier

10.1145/3180155.3180180

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180180

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