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How modern news aggregators help development communities shape and share knowledge

Published: 27 May 2018 Publication History

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.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICSE '18: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering
    May 2018
    1307 pages
    ISBN:9781450356381
    DOI:10.1145/3180155
    • Conference Chair:
    • Michel Chaudron,
    • General Chair:
    • Ivica Crnkovic,
    • Program Chairs:
    • Marsha Chechik,
    • Mark Harman
    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 the author(s) 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].

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    Published: 27 May 2018

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    1. development communities
    2. knowledge sharing
    3. news aggregators

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