Stack Overflow incentive system awards users with reputation scores to ensure quality. The decentralized nature of the forum may make the incentive system prone to manipulation. This paper offers, for the first time, a comprehensive study of the reported types of reputation manipulation scenarios that might be exercised in Stack Overflow and the prevalence of such reputation gamers by a qualitative study of 1,697 posts from meta Stack Exchange sites. We found four different types of reputation fraud scenarios, such as voting rings where communities form to upvote each other repeatedly on similar posts. We developed algorithms that enable platform managers to automatically identify these suspicious reputation gaming scenarios for review. The first algorithm identifies isolated/semi-isolated communities where probable reputation frauds may occur mostly by collaborating with each other. The second algorithm looks for sudden unusual big jumps in the reputation scores of users. We evaluated the performance of our algorithms by examining the reputation history dashboard of Stack Overflow users from the Stack Overflow website. We observed that around 60-80% of users flagged as suspicious by our algorithms experienced reductions in their reputation scores by Stack Overflow.
Thu 1 MayDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
11:00 - 12:30 | Human and Social 2Research Track / Journal-first Papers at 206 plus 208 Chair(s): Alexander Serebrenik Eindhoven University of Technology | ||
11:00 15mTalk | Code Today, Deadline Tomorrow: Procrastination Among Software Developers Research Track Zeinabsadat Saghi University of Southern California, Thomas Zimmermann University of California, Irvine, Souti Chattopadhyay University of Southern California | ||
11:15 15mTalk | "Get Me In The Groove": A Mixed Methods Study on Supporting ADHD Professional Programmers Research Track Kaia Newman Carnegie Mellon University, Sarah Snay University of Michigan, Madeline Endres University of Massachusetts Amherst, Manasvi Parikh University of Michigan, Andrew Begel Carnegie Mellon University Pre-print | ||
11:30 15mTalk | Hints Help Finding and Fixing Bugs Differently in Python and Text-based Program Representations Research Track Ruchit Rawal Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Victor-Alexandru Padurean Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Sven Apel Saarland University, Adish Singla Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Mariya Toneva Max Planck Institute for Software Systems Pre-print | ||
11:45 15mTalk | How Scientists Use Jupyter Notebooks: Goals, Quality Attributes, and Opportunities Research Track Ruanqianqian (Lisa) Huang University of California, San Diego, Savitha Ravi UC San Diego, Michael He UCSD, Boyu Tian University of California, San Diego, Sorin Lerner University of California at San Diego, Michael Coblenz University of California, San Diego Pre-print | ||
12:00 15mTalk | Investigating the Online Recruitment and Selection Journey of Novice Software Engineers: Anti-patterns and Recommendations Journal-first Papers Miguel Setúbal Federal University of Ceará, Tayana Conte Universidade Federal do Amazonas, Marcos Kalinowski Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Allysson Allex Araújo Federal University of Cariri Link to publication Pre-print | ||
12:15 15mTalk | Reputation Gaming in Crowd Technical Knowledge Sharing Journal-first Papers Iren Mazloomzadeh École Polytechnique de Montréal, Gias Uddin York University, Canada, Foutse Khomh Polytechnique Montréal, Ashkan Sami Edinburgh Napier University |