A comparison of communication tone and responding across users and developers in two R mailing lists

Abstract

The R programming language has an active community of both users and developers, which maintain mailing lists to communicate. Given their differences in training and stability, the effects of communication tone on responding may differ across these two groups. We thus compared the prevalence and characteristics of different tones in the R-help user and Rdevel developer mailing lists over a ten-year period as well as their relation to replies. Our analyses indicate that developers displayed marginally more positive and negative tones than users. Moreover, developers seemed less influenced by tone when choosing to reply to messages. Overall, our results suggest that different tones may produce small differences in responding across users and developers.