What Makes Programmers Laugh? Exploring the Submissions of the Subreddit r/ProgrammerHumor

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kuutila, Miikka, Rantala, Leevi, Li, Junhao, Hosio, Simo, Mäntylä, Mika
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Kuutila, Miikka
Rantala, Leevi
Li, Junhao
Hosio, Simo
Mäntylä, Mika
author_facet Kuutila, Miikka
Rantala, Leevi
Li, Junhao
Hosio, Simo
Mäntylä, Mika
contents Background: Humor is a fundamental part of human communication, with prior work linking positive humor in the workplace to positive outcomes, such as improved performance and job satisfaction. Aims: This study aims to investigate programming-related humor in a large social media community. Methodology: We collected 139,718 submissions from Reddit subreddit r/ProgrammerHumor. Both textual and image-based (memes) submissions were considered. The image data was processed with OCR to extract text from images for NLP analysis. Multiple regression models were built to investigate what makes submissions humorous. Additionally, a random sample of 800 submissions was labeled by human annotators regarding their relation to theories of humor, suitability for the workplace, the need for programming knowledge to understand the submission, and whether images in image-based submissions added context to the submission. Results: Our results indicate that predicting the humor of software developers is difficult. Our best regression model was able to explain only 10% of the variance. However, statistically significant differences were observed between topics, submission times, and associated humor theories. Our analysis reveals that the highest submission scores are achieved by imagebased submissions that are created during the winter months in the northern hemisphere, between 2-3pm UTC on weekends, which are distinctly related to superiority and incongruity theories of humor, and are about the topic of "Learning". Conclusions: Predicting humor with natural language processing methods is challenging. We discuss the benefits and inherent difficulties in assessing perceived humor of submissions, as well as possible avenues for future work. Additionally, our replication package should help future studies and can act as a joke repository for the software industry and education.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_07020
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What Makes Programmers Laugh? Exploring the Submissions of the Subreddit r/ProgrammerHumor
Kuutila, Miikka
Rantala, Leevi
Li, Junhao
Hosio, Simo
Mäntylä, Mika
Software Engineering
Background: Humor is a fundamental part of human communication, with prior work linking positive humor in the workplace to positive outcomes, such as improved performance and job satisfaction. Aims: This study aims to investigate programming-related humor in a large social media community. Methodology: We collected 139,718 submissions from Reddit subreddit r/ProgrammerHumor. Both textual and image-based (memes) submissions were considered. The image data was processed with OCR to extract text from images for NLP analysis. Multiple regression models were built to investigate what makes submissions humorous. Additionally, a random sample of 800 submissions was labeled by human annotators regarding their relation to theories of humor, suitability for the workplace, the need for programming knowledge to understand the submission, and whether images in image-based submissions added context to the submission. Results: Our results indicate that predicting the humor of software developers is difficult. Our best regression model was able to explain only 10% of the variance. However, statistically significant differences were observed between topics, submission times, and associated humor theories. Our analysis reveals that the highest submission scores are achieved by imagebased submissions that are created during the winter months in the northern hemisphere, between 2-3pm UTC on weekends, which are distinctly related to superiority and incongruity theories of humor, and are about the topic of "Learning". Conclusions: Predicting humor with natural language processing methods is challenging. We discuss the benefits and inherent difficulties in assessing perceived humor of submissions, as well as possible avenues for future work. Additionally, our replication package should help future studies and can act as a joke repository for the software industry and education.
title What Makes Programmers Laugh? Exploring the Submissions of the Subreddit r/ProgrammerHumor
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07020