Motivation Under Gamification: An Empirical Study of Developers’ Motivations and Contributions in Stack Overflow

To encourage developers’ volunteer contributions, modern programming question and answer (Q&A) sites like Stack Overflow (SO) employ gamified incentive mechanisms such as reputation and badges. Understanding developers’ motivations in the presence of gamification and the relationship between their motivations and behavioral outcomes is crucial for community building and designing good incentive mechanisms. Grounded on self-determination theory, we conducted a survey with 938 developers who participate in SO to understand their participation motivations and incentive perceptions. By connecting the survey responses with the SO data, we quantitatively analyzed how the developers’ motivations and satisfaction of needs relate to their effort and contribution quality. Our main findings are as follows: (1) despite the presence of gamified incentive mechanisms, developers are mainly motivated by intrinsic motivation to participate in SO; (2) developers who have strong motivations to gain gamification rewards are associated with higher intrinsic and integrated motivations, while developers with more development experiences are less motivated by the gamified incentives; (3) both extrinsic motivations (in terms of career prospects) and intrinsic motivations (regarding self-improvement and helping others) can motivate developers to make high-quantity and high-quality contributions; and (4) high-level satisfaction of needs for competency and autonomy has a positive effect on developers making high-quantity and high-quality contributions and addressing difficult problems. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for developer motivation and gamification in the crowdsourcing context and for the mechanism design of gamified crowdsourced platforms.