The Ugly Side of Stack Overflow: An In-depth Exploration of the Social Dynamics of New Users’ Engagement and Community Perception of Them

Stack Overflow (SO) is the most popular knowledge-sharing platform for novice to experienced programmers. It is growing gradually with its rapidly expanding community of new users. However, the hostile environment towards new users has been a burning issue for several years, which hinders the enhancement of a skillful community. In this research, we study a subset of users registered in the last 45 days or have a reputation of less than or equal to 50 and term them “neophytes.” We study if neophytes experience an unwelcoming environment when cooperating on Stack Overflow; if so, we determine the potential reasons behind this problem and determine how much adverse situation affects neophytes’ activity. According to our findings, neophytes face difficulty while cooperating on the platform and 9 potential reasons (such as deletion or closing of posts, no answer to the post, rude comments, misconception of SO rules and culture, and steep learning curve) are responsible behind this difficulty. Moreover, the activeness of regular users is 6.71 times more than the neophytes who face adverse situations. It depicts that facing adverse situations reduces the activeness of neophytes. The study aims to address the problems and pathways to maintain a friendly environment for all. The findings of our research study can be used to develop guidance in making the SO community more user-friendly and aid researchers in future studies to improve the Stack Overflow environment.