Social media, especially Twitter, has always been a part of the professional lives of software developers, with prior work reporting on
a diversity of usage scenarios, including sharing information, staying current, and promoting one’s work. However, previous studies
of Twitter use by software developers typically lack information
about activities of the study subjects (and their outcomes) on other
platforms. To enable such future research, in this paper we propose
a computational approach to cross-link users across Twitter and
GitHub, revealing (at least) 70,427 users active on both. As a preliminary analysis of this dataset, we report on a case study of 786
tweets by open-source developers about GitHub work, combining
automatic characterization of tweet authors in terms of their relationship to the GitHub items linked in their tweets with qualitative
analysis of the tweet contents. We find that different developer
roles tend to have different tweeting behaviors, with repository
owners being perhaps the most distinctive group compared to other
project contributors and followers. We also note a sizeable group
of people who follow others on GitHub and tweet about these people’s work, but do not otherwise contribute to those open-source
projects. Our results and public dataset open up multiple future
research directions.
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This content will become publicly available on May 14, 2024
Understanding information diffusion about open-source projects on Twitter, HackerNews, and Reddit
The diffusion of information about open-source
projects is a key factor influencing the adoption of projects and
the allocation of developer efforts. Developers learn about new
projects, and evaluate their quality and importance by accessing
the related information. Social media is an important channel for
information diffusion about open-source projects, with previous
research suggesting the existence of a social media ecosystem
that consists of multiple platforms and collectively supports
information diffusion in open source.
With different features supporting information diffusion, the
same piece of information likely reaches different developer
communities on different platforms, which attracts the attention
and contribution of different developers and thus influences the
success of open-source projects. Despite its importance, few works
looked at the identity of the developer community that projectrelated
information reaches on social media platforms and its
associated impact on the discussed project.
In this work, we track social media discussions on open-source
projects on three different platforms: Twitter, HackerNews, and
Reddit. We first describe the dynamics of project-related information
diffusion across platforms, and we analyze the association
between the number of posts on each platform, and the number
of developers attracted to the discussed project from different
communities. We find that posts about open-source projects first
appear on Twitter and HackerNews, then move more towards
Reddit. The number of project-related posts on Twitter mostly
associate with the attracted developers from communities that
are close to the project’s main contributor, while posts on
other platforms associate more with the attention from remote
communities.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1901311
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10439400
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 56 to 67
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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To address this gap in the literature, the current study uses qualitative and content analysis research techniques to illustrate the risk of self-harm and suicide contagion through the portrayal of BWC on YouTube and Twitter Posts. The purpose of this study is to analyze the portrayal of BWC on YouTube and Twitter in order to identify the themes that are presented on YouTube and Twitter posts that share and discuss BWC. In addition, we want to explore to what extent are YouTube videos compliant with safe and effective suicide messaging guidelines proposed by the Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC). Method Two social media websites were used to gather the data: 60 videos and 1,112 comments from YouTube and 150 posts from Twitter. The common themes of the YouTube videos, comments on those videos, and the Twitter posts were identified using grounded, thematic content analysis on the collected data (Padgett, 2001). Three codebooks were built, one for each type of data. 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