A first look at unfollowing behavior on GitHub

Many open source software projects rely on contributors to fix bugs and contribute new features. On GitHub, developers often broadcast their activities to followers, which may entice followers to be project contributors. It is important to understand unfollowing behavior, maintain current followers,...

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Main Authors: JIANG, Jing, LO, David, YANG, Yun, LI, Jianfeng, ZHANG, Li
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Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4361
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5364/viewcontent/Unfollowing_Github_2019_afv.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
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spelling sg-smu-ink.sis_research-53642019-06-13T09:56:34Z A first look at unfollowing behavior on GitHub JIANG, Jing LO, David YANG, Yun LI, Jianfeng ZHANG, Li Many open source software projects rely on contributors to fix bugs and contribute new features. On GitHub, developers often broadcast their activities to followers, which may entice followers to be project contributors. It is important to understand unfollowing behavior, maintain current followers, and attract some followers to become contributors in OSS projects.Our objective in this paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of unfollowing behavior on GitHub. To the best of our knowledge, we present a first look at unfollowing behavior on GitHub. We collect a dataset containing 701,364 developers and their 4,602,440 following relationships in March 2016. We also crawl their following relationships in May 2013, August 2015 and November 2015. We conduct surveys, define potential impact factors, and analyze the correlation of factors with the likelihood of unfollowing behavior.Our main observations are: (1) Between May 2013 and August 2015, 19.8% of active developers ever unfollowed some users. (2) Developers are more likely to unfollow those who have fewer activities, lower programming language similarity, and asymmetric relationships. Our results give suggestions for developers to reduce the likelihood of being unfollowed by their followers, and attract researchers’ attention on relationship dissolution. 2019-01-01T08:00:00Z text application/pdf https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4361 info:doi/10.1016/j.infsof.2018.08.012 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5364/viewcontent/Unfollowing_Github_2019_afv.pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems eng Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University GitHub Unfollow Relationship dissolution Software Engineering
institution Singapore Management University
building SMU Libraries
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider SMU Libraries
collection InK@SMU
language English
topic GitHub
Unfollow
Relationship dissolution
Software Engineering
spellingShingle GitHub
Unfollow
Relationship dissolution
Software Engineering
JIANG, Jing
LO, David
YANG, Yun
LI, Jianfeng
ZHANG, Li
A first look at unfollowing behavior on GitHub
description Many open source software projects rely on contributors to fix bugs and contribute new features. On GitHub, developers often broadcast their activities to followers, which may entice followers to be project contributors. It is important to understand unfollowing behavior, maintain current followers, and attract some followers to become contributors in OSS projects.Our objective in this paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of unfollowing behavior on GitHub. To the best of our knowledge, we present a first look at unfollowing behavior on GitHub. We collect a dataset containing 701,364 developers and their 4,602,440 following relationships in March 2016. We also crawl their following relationships in May 2013, August 2015 and November 2015. We conduct surveys, define potential impact factors, and analyze the correlation of factors with the likelihood of unfollowing behavior.Our main observations are: (1) Between May 2013 and August 2015, 19.8% of active developers ever unfollowed some users. (2) Developers are more likely to unfollow those who have fewer activities, lower programming language similarity, and asymmetric relationships. Our results give suggestions for developers to reduce the likelihood of being unfollowed by their followers, and attract researchers’ attention on relationship dissolution.
format text
author JIANG, Jing
LO, David
YANG, Yun
LI, Jianfeng
ZHANG, Li
author_facet JIANG, Jing
LO, David
YANG, Yun
LI, Jianfeng
ZHANG, Li
author_sort JIANG, Jing
title A first look at unfollowing behavior on GitHub
title_short A first look at unfollowing behavior on GitHub
title_full A first look at unfollowing behavior on GitHub
title_fullStr A first look at unfollowing behavior on GitHub
title_full_unstemmed A first look at unfollowing behavior on GitHub
title_sort first look at unfollowing behavior on github
publisher Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
publishDate 2019
url https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4361
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5364/viewcontent/Unfollowing_Github_2019_afv.pdf
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