I heart hacker news: expanding qualitative research findings by analyzing social news websites
Abstract
Grounded theory is an important research method in empirical software engineering, but it is also time consuming, tedious, and complex. This makes it difficult for researchers to assess if threats, such as missing themes or sample bias, have inadvertently materialized. To better assess such threats, our new idea is that we can automatically extract knowledge from social news websites, such as Hacker News, to easily replicate existing grounded theory research --- and then compare the results. We conduct a replication study on static analysis tool adoption using Hacker News. We confirm that even a basic replication and analysis using social news websites can offer additional insights to existing themes in studies, while also identifying new themes. For example, we identified that security was not a theme discovered in the original study on tool adoption. As a long-term vision, we consider techniques from the discipline of knowledge discovery to make this replication process more automatic.
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Online community investigations can yield insights into qualitative research topics, with results comparable to and sometimes surpassing traditional qualitative research techniques.
“Barik et al. (2015) demonstrated that online community investigations can 'yield insights into qualitative research topics, with results comparable to and sometimes surpassing traditional qualitative research techniques'.”
From Vibe coding: programming through conversation with artificial intelligence (2025) · cites this paper as Barik et al. (2015)
YouTube and Twitch function similarly for the vibe coding phenomenon as Hacker News does for software developers, as social environments where programming practices are formed and enacted, making them valuable contexts for studying emerging programming practices.
“Just as Hacker News serves as 'an important venue for software developers to exchange ideas as part of a broader cultural ecosystem' (Barik et al. (2015), referring to Wu et al. (2014)), YouTube and Twitch function similarly for the vibe coding phenomenon. These platforms are social environments where programming practices are formed and enacted, making them valuable contexts for studying emerging”
From Vibe coding: programming through conversation with artificial intelligence (2025) · cites this paper as Barik et al. (2015)
Cites
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“Just as Hacker News serves as “an important venue for software developers to exchange ideas as part of a broader cultural ecosystem” (Barik et al. (2015), referring to Wu et al. (2014)), YouTube and Twitch function similarly for the vibe coding phenomenon.”
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- Authors
- Barik, T., Johnson, B., & Murphy-Hill, E.
- Affiliations
- ABB (United States) (US)
- North Carolina State University (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2015-08-30
- Pages
- 882-885
- OpenAlex
- W2048713687
- Cited by
- 17
- References
- 16
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 1
- FWCI
- 10.86
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (1252995,1217700)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Qualitative Research Methods and Applications
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
- Keywords
- Hacker News, grounded theory, replication, knowledge extraction, knowledge discovery, software engineering research, sampling bias
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