Reputation Gaming in Crowd Technical Knowledge Sharing

Mazloomzadeh, Iren; Uddin, Gias; Khomh, Foutse; Sami, Ashkan

Abstract

Stack Overrow incentive system awards users with reputation scores to ensure quality. The decentralized nature of the forum may make the incentive system prone to manipulation. This paper ooers, for the rst time, a comprehensive study of the reported types of reputation manipulation scenarios that might be exercised in Stack Overrow and the prevalence of such reputation gamers by a qualitative study of 1,697 posts from meta Stack Exchange sites. We found four diierent types of reputation fraud scenarios, such as voting rings where communities form to upvote each other repeatedly on similar posts. We developed algorithms that enable platform managers to automatically identify these suspicious reputation gaming scenarios for review. The rst algorithm identiies isolated/semi-isolated communities where probable reputation frauds may occur mostly by collaborating with each other. The second algorithm looks for sudden unusual big jumps in the reputation scores of users. We evaluated the performance of our algorithms by examining the reputation history dashboard of Stack Overrow users from the Stack Overrow website. We observed that around 60-80% of users agged as suspicious by our algorithms experienced reductions in their reputation scores by Stack Overrow.

Citation

Mazloomzadeh, I., Uddin, G., Khomh, F., & Sami, A. (2025). Reputation Gaming in Crowd Technical Knowledge Sharing. ACM transactions on software engineering and methodology, 34(1), Article 10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3691627

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 11, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Sep 4, 2024
• Publication Date: 2025
• Deposit Date: Jul 15, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 4, 2024
• Journal: ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
• Print ISSN: 1049-331X
• Electronic ISSN: 1557-7392
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 34
• Issue: 1
• Article Number: 10
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3691627
• Keywords: Software and its engineering, Software creation and management, Documentation, Search-based software engineering, Reputation, Fraud, Voting, Trust, Review, Developer Forums,