"Did You Miss My Comment or What?" Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (C. Miller, S. Cohen, D. Klug, B. Vasilescu, C. Kästner)
Tue, 31 May 2022 12:28:28 GMT

Courtney Miller, Sophie Cohen, Daniel Klug, Bogdan Vasilescu, and Christian Kästner. "Did You Miss My Comment or What?" Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions. In Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), pages 710--722, New York, NY: ACM Press, May 2022. Distinguished Paper Award.

Online toxicity is ubiquitous across the internet and its negative impact on the people and online communities it effects has been well documented. However, toxicity manifests differently on various platforms and toxicity in open source communities, while frequently discussed, is not well understood. We take a first stride at understanding the characteristics of open source toxicity to better inform future work designing effective intervention and detection methods. To this end, we curate a sample of 100 toxic GitHub issue discussions combining multiple search and sampling strategies. We then qualitatively analyze the sample to gain an understanding of the characteristics of open-source toxicity. We find that the prevalent forms of toxicity in open source differ from those observed on other platforms like Reddit or Wikipedia. We find some of the most prevalent forms of toxicity in open source are entitled, demanding, and arrogant comments from project users and insults arising from technical disagreements. In addition, not all toxicity was written by people external to the projects, project members were also common authors of toxicity. We also provide in-depth discussions about the implications of our findings including patterns that may be useful for detection work and subsequent questions for future work.