Quick Trigger on Stack Overflow: A Study of Gamification-Influenced Member Tendencies

In recent times, gamification has become a popular technique to aid online communities stimulate active member participation. Gamification promotes a reward-driven approach, usually measured by response-time. Possible concerns of gamification could a trade-off between speedy over quality responses. Conversely, bias toward easier question selection for maximum reward may exist. In this study, we analyze the distribution gamification-influenced tendencies on the Q&A Stack Overflow online community. In addition, we define some gamification-influenced metrics related to response time to a question post. We carried experiments of a four-month period analyzing 101,291 members posts. Over this period, we determined a Rapid Response time of 327 seconds (5.45 minutes). Key findings suggest that around 92% of SO members have fewer rapid responses that non-rapid responses. Accepted answers have no clear relationship with rapid responses. However, we did find that rapid responses significantly contain tags that did not follow their usual tagging tendencies.