Analyzing the Friendliness of Exchanges in an Online Software Developer Community

Abstract—Many online communities struggle with conflicts — e.g. between newcomers and elders — at some point. In July 2012, the Stack Exchange organization attempted to assess the overall “niceness ” of the Stack Overflow community by rating the “friendliness ” of 7,000 comments made on the site over a 4 year period. We performed a deeper examination of the comment dataset published by Stack Exchange. We find a high degree of comment repetition in the Stack Overflow database and suggest some simple heuristics that may help in automatically identifying unfriendly comments, providing managers of developer commu-nities with simple means that could counter hostility. I