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StackOverflow and Github Visualized As Cities

Posted by Soulskill on from the have-your-neighbor-committed dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ekisto is an interactive network visualization of three online communities: StackOverflow, Github and Friendfeed. Ekisto tries to map our online habitats using graph algorithms and the city as a metaphor. A graph layout algorithm arranges users in 2D space based on their similarity. Cosine similarity is computed based on the users' network (Friendfeed), collaborate, watch, fork and follow relationships (Github), or based on the tags of posts contributed by users (StackOverflow). The height of each user represents the normalized value of the user's Pagerank (Github, Friendfeed) or their reputation points (StackOverflow)."

6 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. The StackOverflow map is useless by rebelwarlock · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's just a bunch of grey pillars, some of which have avatars plastered on top. Even in query mode, all you can get are usernames. What is the significance of the clustering? How do the different tags affect it? With the lack of information provided, they could have actually just pulled this entire visualization out of their asses and it wouldn't have made a difference.

    1. Re:The StackOverflow map is useless by netpatriot · · Score: 5, Informative

      Did you read the About section? They are clustered by the tags of the posts. I can recognize several subcommunities I participate in... C++ land and Python island around Martelli.

    2. Re:The StackOverflow map is useless by deroby · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I guess it depends on the subjects you're interested in. Given the size of SO (well, we should probably consider the entire Stack Exchange group, no ?) there's bound to be sub-cultures. Personally I rather occasionally browse the SQL related tags and while there are quite a bit of 'Please do my homework' kind of questions, those often don't get the answer they're looking for (that is: the worked out solution) but rather get pointers into 'the right direction'. Luckily there also are also quite a few of interesting questions that spark discussions and often-times indirectly gives me some insight into something I hadn't ever thought about before. I find that valuable. Feel free to look up my userid and you'll notice that hardly have any reputation points behind my name; in fact I have 'worked' just enough to be able to post/edit comments etc; otherwise I really don't care.

      A long, long time ago I used to spend quite a bit of time on ExpertsExchange. Although I enjoyed helping out others at first it became quite frustrating after a while to see how a few people would throw a quick & dirty solution only seconds (?!?!) after it was posted. By the time I had written a fleshed out answer the original poster would already have accepted the (imho) downright terrible advice and there was no way to undo the situation except for adding a comment along the lines: please don' t do it like this for reasons x, y and z. I had no clue why (or how) these quick-posters would do this as their reputation already was sky-high until I noticed that the site had leader-boards that would nominate their 'best' people on a monthly/yearly basis. After that I gave up.

      At least on SO you can down-vote a prematurely accepted answer and vote up one that makes a lot more sense. Maybe the original poster won't care to come back, but at least when someone comes around googling for an answer he'll be presented with the 'better' answer first AND the Q&D poster actually gets 'punished' by the down-votes. (As are the people who down-vote, so it's 'harder' to game the system). I'm sure SO has something like 'greatest contributors' too, and yes, there is all the badges and reputation stuff; but it seems to me there is a lot less attention given to it.

      --
      If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
  2. Re:Why is that modded down? He's right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What? I participate in a couple systems-level code projects at Github and recognize none of your comments. Selection bias, perhaps.

  3. Nice first step for Visual Analytics by bourdux · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I like it very much. That's an appealing way to go beyond the classic 2D graph visualization. I am part of the StackOverflow community and this visualization really shows the sub-communities existing in the website. Sometimes you have a huge skyscraper surrounded by smaller buildings, like the Git related questions (search for user ID 6309). Then you have less specific communities such as the web development (CSS, PHP, Jquery, Javascript,...) one (search for my own ID: 806221) where there are less leaders but a lot of mid-level reputation contributors.

    I think this visualization could be nicely completed by community labels. To go on with the city metaphor, you could have a road sign for each cluster of buildings. I can count 10 big community in the StackOverflow metropolitan area. A modularity algorithm would identify these clusters. Then you could get a list of most frequent tags in the users of the cluster to build the road sign.

  4. Re:Why is that modded down? He's right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Absolute crap - just because tools might get used in ways you don't like doesn't make them inherently bad - that goes for languages and websites alike.

    Are you honestly trying to suggest that SourceForge has worked out well? Look at it - it's virtually impossible to find your way to anything useful, everything is cluttered, and it doesn't offer the things people want and need. GitHub's social stuff isn't even why people use it - it's useful and fun, so sure, people like it because of that, but people use it because it makes opening up your code painless - for you and for everyone else.

    SO is likewise a great resource. Yes, some people post for rep, but is that an issue, really? Crap stuff gets pushed down and the good stuff gets pushed up. I've not seen anyone successfully push 'best practices' that were not legitimately good ideas. If you think otherwise, feel free to vote that stuff down and post your own answers.

    Your post in short 'WAAAHHHH THINGS HAVE CHANGED AND I DON'T LIKE IT' - grow the fuck up.