Visualizing Discord servers

Raglianti, Marco; Minelli, Roberto; Nagy, Csaba; Lanza, Michele

doi:10.1109/VISSOFT52517.2021.00029

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Conference paper (in proceedings)

Visualizing Discord servers

Raglianti, Marco ORCID REVEAL, Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
Minelli, Roberto ORCID REVEAL, Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
Nagy, Csaba ORCID REVEAL, Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera
Lanza, Michele ORCID REVEAL, Istituto del software (SI), Facoltà di scienze informatiche, Università della Svizzera italiana, Svizzera

2021

Published in:

2021 Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT). - 2021, p. 150-154

English The last decade has seen the rise of global software community platforms, such as Slack, Gitter, and Discord. They allow developers to discuss implementation issues, report bugs, and, in general, interact with one another. Such real-time communication platforms are thus slowly complementing, if not replacing, more traditional communication channels, such as development mailing lists. Apart from simple text messaging and conference calls, they allow the sharing of any type of content, such as videos, images, and source code. This is turning such platforms into precious information sources when it comes to searching for documentation and understanding design and implementation choices. However, the velocity and volatility of the contents shared and discussed on such platforms, combined with their often informal structure, makes it difficult to grasp and differentiate the relevant pieces of information. We present a visual analytics approach, supported by a tool named DISCORDANCE, which provides numerous custom views to support the understanding of Discord servers in terms of their structure, contents, and community. We illustrate DISCORDANCE, using as running example the public Pharo development community Discord Server, which counts to date ∼180k messages shared among ∼2,900 developers, spanning 5 years of history. Based on our analyses, we distill and discuss interesting insights and lessons learned.

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