Which questions are valuable in online Q&A communities? A question’s position in a knowledge network matters

Online Q&A communities serve as important channels for diffusing knowledge. Questions, the main content in these forums, are not well investigated in the research literature. This study explores why some questions attract more attention in this context by emphasizing the knowledge network embedded in the questions. We examine how the characteristics of the question tags impact the popularity of the questions by collecting data from a programming-related Q&A site—Stack Overflow. We collected data for ten years, spanning the years 2008 to 2017, and included 6,833,276 users and 34,857,917 questions and answers in the analyses. The empirical analyses indicated that the frequency of the question tag is positively related to the popularity of the question. Additionally, the tag distance of the questions is curvilinearly related to the popularity of the questions in an inverted U-shape. Our study contributes to research discussions on how knowledge is diffused in an online community and further examines how these types of online forums efficiently promote knowledge sharing through the presentation of user’s questions.