How Modern News Aggregators Help Development Communities Shape and Share Knowledge

How Modern News Aggregators Help Development Communities Shape and Share Knowledge

Aniche, Maurício (TU Delft Software Engineering)
Treude, Christoph (University of Adelaide)
Steinmacher, Igor (Northern Arizona University)
Wiese, Igor (Technological University of Paraná (UTFPR), Campo Mourão)
Pinto, Gustavo (University of Pará)
Storey, Margaret Anne (University of Victoria)
Gerosa, Marco Aurélio (Northern Arizona University)

2018

Many developers rely on modern news aggregator sites such as reddit and hn 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 hn. 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.

News aggregators
development communities
knowledge sharing

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:cc0d82aa-c533-4402-8287-7ad96d9f4e54

https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180180

978-1-4503-5638-1

Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering

ICSE 2018, 2018-05-27 → 2018-06-03, Gothenburg, Sweden

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2018 Maurício Aniche, Christoph Treude, Igor Steinmacher, Igor Wiese, Gustavo Pinto, Margaret Anne Storey, Marco Aurélio Gerosa