Friendliness Of Stack Overflow Towards Newbies

Abstract: In today's modern digital world, we have a number of online Question and Answer platforms like Stack Exchange, Quora, and GFG that serve as a medium for people to communicate and help each other. In this paper, we analyzed the effectiveness of Stack Overflow in helping newbies to programming. Every user on this platform goes through a journey. For the first 12 months, we consider them to be a newbie. Post 12 months they come under one of the following categories: Experienced, Lurkers, or Inquisitive. Each question asked has tags assigned to it and we observe that questions with some specific tags have a faster response time indicating an active community in that field over others. The platform had a steady growth up to 2013 after which it started declining, but recently during the pandemic 2020, we can see rejuvenated activity on the platform.