Reputation Gaming in Stack Overflow

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Mazloomzadeh, Iren, Uddin, Gias, Khomh, Foutse, Sami, Ashkan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2021
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author Mazloomzadeh, Iren
Uddin, Gias
Khomh, Foutse
Sami, Ashkan
author_facet Mazloomzadeh, Iren
Uddin, Gias
Khomh, Foutse
Sami, Ashkan
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2111_07101
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reputation Gaming in Stack Overflow
Mazloomzadeh, Iren
Uddin, Gias
Khomh, Foutse
Sami, Ashkan
Software Engineering
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.
title Reputation Gaming in Stack Overflow
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.07101