For the past couple of weeks, we have been talking to many active r/programming contributors to understand how r/programming impacts their life as developers.
We already observed several interesting things, such as:
- Our participants have used what that they saw on r/programming to build new (business) projects, get up-to-date with new technologies, and see what's going on with technologies they do not use at work.
- R/programming seems to be a trustworthy source — technical posts do not face the ‘fake news’ problem
- R/programming enables users to be in touch with many experts from different areas
- One of the main reasons to share on r/programming is to collect and discuss different opinions on that topic
- Karma is a cool number, shows how interesting your story was, but nothing more than that. Points on Stack Overflow are ‘more important to have’
- Users rarely downvote. The common reason to do so is when a post/comment is off-topic or aggressive
- Frequent posters believe that the number of negative comments is too high
- Comments found on HackerNews seem deeper than the ones found in r/programming.
Do these findings make sense to you? We are still working on compiling all the answers and providing a complete report.
Now, we would love for the community to fill out this survey so that we can generalize these results. The survey only contains 7 multiple choice questions and takes less than 5 minutes to complete. If you leave your e-mail, we’ll raffle a 50 USD gift card from Amazon!
The survey: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/3744752/bba265ac9aec
We’ll be back with more interesting data!