• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Chemistry

Tweeting a help wanted Sign: Carnegie Mellon University research shows Twitter drives popularity, contributors to open-source software

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
June 14, 2022
in Chemistry
Reading Time: 3 mins read
0
Example Tweets
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

Want to be popular with lots of friends? Get out there and tweet. 

Example Tweets

Credit: Carnegie Mellon University

Want to be popular with lots of friends? Get out there and tweet. 

That advice holds true for open-source software projects as well, according to a new study from School of Computer Science researchers.

Led by Hongbo Fang, a Ph.D. student in the Institute for Software Research’s (ISR) Societal Computing program, the research team found that Twitter is an effective way to attract more attention and contributors to open-source projects on GitHub. Fang presented the study, “This Is Damn Slick!” Estimating the Impact of Tweets on Open-Source Project Popularity and New Contributors,” at the International Conference on Software Engineering, where the research won a Distinguished Paper award.

The study showed that tweeting about a project produced on average a 7% increase in popularity — at least one star on GitHub — and generated a 2% increase in the number of contributors. The more tweets about a project, the more stars and contributors it gained.

“We have realized that social media has become more and more important in open-source communities,” Fang said. “Attracting attention and new contributors will lead to higher quality and better software.”

For the most part, open-source software is developed and maintained by volunteers. The more people working on a project, the better the result. Developers and others use the software, report issues and work to fix those issues. Unpopular projects risk not receiving the attention they require.

This mostly all-volunteer workforce maintains software that millions of people use every day. For example, nearly any HTTPS website uses open-source OpenSSL to secure its content. A security bug, Heartbleed, found in OpenSSL cost businesses millions of dollars to fix after it was reported in 2014. Another piece of open-source software, cURL, allows connected devices to send data to each other and runs on about 1 billion devices. And the list goes on and on.

“Can you name a piece of technology that doesn’t use some open-source software?” asked Bogdan Vasilescu, an associate professor in ISR and Fang’s advisor. “All the apps on your phone and all the companies that make them use open-source software. The question is, where can’t you find open-source?”

Fang’s research into Twitter’s impact on increasing an open-source project’s popularity and attracting new contributors is part of a body of work in Vasilescu’s Socio-Technical Research Using Data Excavation Lab (STRUDEL) that looks at how to make the open-source community and its work more sustainable. Open-source software is the digital infrastructure, the roads and bridges underlying modern technology. Without sustainable maintenance, that infrastructure can crumble.

“People have realized how important open-source is and how at risk some of these projects are of being abandoned or not maintained,” Vasilescu said. “There are a million ideas out there about how to make open-source better. People have opinions and often disagree over these ideas because there is no hard science that looks at what is actually effective.”   

The researchers studied 44,544 tweets containing links to 2,370 open-source GitHub repositories for evidence that the tweets caused the projects to attract new stars and contributors. The team took a scientific approach to the research, comparing the gain in stars and contributors of GitHub projects mentioned on Twitter against a control group of projects not mentioned on Twitter.

The study also outlined the characteristics of high-impact tweets, the type of people likely attracted to a project by the posts, and how those people differ from contributors attracted through other means. Tweets coming from fans of a project and not developers themselves work best to attract attention. Posts asking for help with a specific task or project get a better response. New contributors attracted by tweets tend to be newer to GitHub but aren’t less-experienced programmers. And new interest may not translate into new help.

“Tweets tend to attract more community attention via stars than actual developers,” Fang said. “More people know about a project, but they don’t necessarily commit to working on it.”

This gap between attention and action is one of the potential downsides of increasing a project’s popularity that the researchers discuss. More attention often leads to more feature requests or issue reports but not more developers to address them. Increased popularity on social media can lead to more trolls or toxic behavior around the project.

Joining Fang and Vasilescu on the research were Hemank Lamba, a Ph.D. alumnus from the Societal Computing program, and James Herbsleb, the director of and a professor in the ISR.



Share12Tweet8Share2ShareShareShare2

Related Posts

Empowering AI Researchers Through Intelligent Agents

Empowering AI Researchers Through Intelligent Agents

September 24, 2025
blank

3D Electron Diffraction Reveals Chiral Crystal Structures

September 24, 2025

Transforming Pesticide Residues into Plant Nutrients: A Breakthrough for Cleaner Soils and Healthier Crops

September 24, 2025

Elizabeth Hinde and Jorge Alegre-Cebollada Named Recipients of 2026 Michael and Kate Bárány Award

September 23, 2025

POPULAR NEWS

  • Physicists Develop Visible Time Crystal for the First Time

    Physicists Develop Visible Time Crystal for the First Time

    70 shares
    Share 28 Tweet 18
  • Tailored Gene-Editing Technology Emerges as a Promising Treatment for Fatal Pediatric Diseases

    50 shares
    Share 20 Tweet 13
  • Scientists Achieve Ambient-Temperature Light-Induced Heterolytic Hydrogen Dissociation

    49 shares
    Share 20 Tweet 12
  • Rapid Spread of Drug-Resistant Fungus Candidozyma auris in European Hospitals Prompts Urgent Warning from ECDC

    48 shares
    Share 19 Tweet 12

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

Predictive Lab Tests for Cardiac Events Remain Rare but Are on the Rise

Predicting Infant Motor Outcomes via NSE and S100B

How Chronic Cellular Stress and Fatty Acids Fuel Cancer-Associated Gut Bacteria

  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.