In this paper, we study toxic online interactions in issue discussions of open-source communities. Our goal is to qualitatively understand how toxicity impacts an open-source community like GitHub. We are driven by users complaining about toxicity, which leads to burnout and disengagement from the site. We collect a substantial sample of toxic interactions and qualitatively analyze their characteristics to ground future discussions and intervention design.
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"Did you miss my comment or what?": understanding toxicity in open source discussions
Online toxicity is ubiquitous across the internet and its negative
impact on the people and that online communities that it effects
has been well documented. However, toxicity manifests differently
on various platforms and toxicity in open source communities,
while frequently discussed, is not well understood. We take a first
stride at understanding the characteristics of open source toxicity
to better inform future work on designing effective intervention
and detection methods. To this end, we curate a sample of 100 toxic
GitHub issue discussions combining multiple search and sampling
strategies. We then qualitatively analyze the sample to gain an
understanding of the characteristics of open-source toxicity. We
find that the pervasive forms of toxicity in open source differ from
those observed on other platforms like Reddit or Wikipedia. In our
sample, some of the most prevalent forms of toxicity are entitled,
demanding, and arrogant comments from project users as well as
insults arising from technical disagreements. In addition, not all
toxicity was written by people external to the projects; project
members were also common authors of toxicity. We also discuss
the implications of our findings. Among others we hope that our
findings will be useful for future detection work.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1901311
- PAR ID:
- 10340026
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conference on Software Engineering
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 710 to 722
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3510003.3510111
