Bibliographic record
Abstract
UX practitioners increasingly rely on online communities to collaborate on and discuss complex design problems. Understanding how these platforms flourish is thus of interest to both HCI academia and the broader UX discipline. In this study, we comparatively investigate the longevity of two such groups: the r/userexperience community on Reddit and the UX subforum on Stack Exchange. By quantifying how users post online on aggregate and what users discuss in their individual posts, we find that Reddit has grown consistently as a digital forum for UX practice. In contrast, Stack Exchange has contracted despite being more responsive and being as capable of addressing mainstream UX concepts as Reddit. Discussions of niche, higher-level UX concepts on Stack Exchange also declined disproportionately, leading to less conceptual diversity. Our results therefore contribute an initial comparative understanding of community longevity between online UX platforms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".