Geo-locating StackOverflow

The presentation slides I've given at SSE.

Transcript

1. Geo-locating StackOverflow SSE 2013, Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation S Dennis Schenk, Mircea Lungu Software Composition Group University of Bern Switzerland
2. "A Nobel prize is waiting for the person who figures out the economics of information" Q1: Can we visualize the flow of SE information in SO? The world later...
3. Information 4 Reputation
4. Spolsky (and analystics) knows who visits! We want to see who contributes Q2 (bonus for the audience of SSE): How to achieve such success for our tools? Who uses SO?
5. Maximize data- ink ratio. Edward Tufte StackOverflow took the web by storm because it was well-designed: visual & UX http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/10/the-gamification.html
6. Reputation is completely optional. Normal use of Stack Overflow — that is, asking and answering questions — does not require any reputation whatsoever. Stack Overflow is run by you! To help us run the site, you'll need to earn some reputation first. Reputation is a (very) rough measurement of how much the community trusts you. Reputation is never given, it is earned by convincing fellow users that you know what you're talking about. To gain reputation, post good questions and useful answers. Your peers will vote on your posts, and those votes will cause you to gain (or, in rare cases, lose) reputation: answer is voted up +10 question is voted up +5 answer is accepted +15 (+2 to acceptor) post is voted down -2 (-1 to voter) Amass enough reputation points and Stack Overflow will allow you to go beyond simply asking and answering questions: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/59326 And a bit lucky: reputation was intented to be optional but people started playing...
7. Some indeed got a little bit excited about the prospect of earning reputation.
8. Some are even concerned when their reputation is taken away from them that's dumb, you shouldn't be punished because someone else got punished =| – Justin Kirk Apr 18 '12 at 18:25 I had 60 points taken away from me this way just a few minutes ago. I don't see what a user quitting or being removed for violation of the rules has to do with the validity of votes be they upvotes or downvotes.– Michael Chernick Jun 26 '12 at 21:48 I gained points because a user who had downvoted my post got removed - so don't forget that this feature goes both ways. – Tim Apr 19 '12 at 6:47 Thanks for explaining. It hurt to lose 25 points, but the integrity of the site is certainly more important. – cantera25 Jun 7 at 3:19 @cantera25 Yes, fake accounts have been common for a long time, and some users have abused them to gain thousands of reputation before the moderators catch them and destroy the accounts. – Jeremy Banks Jun 6 at 20:57 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/126470
9. The current process is a little funky anyway. "True user" creates sockpuppets to upvote posts of the "true user". "True user" earns badge. All sockpuppets are merged in, and "true user" still holds badge. (Also a literal example.) It is almost like we're doing things halfway. Either revoke badges, or award people for new accomplishments as they earn them. Since badges earned improperly are the much rarer case and much, much hairier, I'm ok with that not being handled as part of the automatic process and only handling it manually when it is truly malicious. Some users even create fake accounts to upvote their own answers!! http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/96782
10. It’s almost like SO is a global market exchange for information.
11. Mapping SO
12. Reputation is massively distributed in the US and Europe
13. The information exchange and reputation grew over several years ...
14. Countries with which SSE participants are affiliated China does not contribute much. Chinese participant at SSE never heard of SO.
15. The usage of the site is not necessarily correlated with reputation.
16. How to geo-locate the users? (see paper) 20% of geo-located users collect more than 80% reputation
17. How to visualize the information? Quicksilver is a tool for hierarchical graph analysis and visualization. Part of Moose. http://scg.unibe.ch/research/quicksilver
18. What are the patterns for the other StackExchange sites? And surely, for more have a look at the paper. What do we learn from SO about worldwide tool adoption? Can we harness developer playfulness to write better software?