Why Some Stack Overflow Questions Get Faster Answers?

Summary

I analyzed Stack Overflow data to see what factors affect how quickly a question gets its first answer, such as tags, code snippets, and user reputation.

About the Data

This project uses the public Stack Overflow dataset available through Google BigQuery. I focused on questions posted since 2020 that received at least one answer, combining information on question text, user reputation, comments, and engagement metrics to build a clean analysis table for exploration.

Data source: Stack Overflow Public Dataset

Methods

I performed exploratory data analysis to uncover patterns across features and applied linear regression to identify which factors were most strongly associated with question outcomes. Since the model had a low R² and failed to capture the patterns well, I conducted error analysis to better understand limitations and refine the approach.

Evaluation

Response times are fastest during working hours (9 AM – 5 PM), likely because more users are active on Stack Overflow during that time.

Questions posted on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday tend to receive the fastest responses, while response times slow down over the weekend, likely because fewer people are working and active on Stack Overflow.

About 20% of the questions are about Python, and around 17% are about JavaScript.

Among the most frequent tags, questions tagged with Excel and Java tend to have slightly longer response times compared to others.