Visual content in the form of images and videos has taken over general-purpose social networks in a variety of ways, streamlining and enriching online communications. We are interested to understand if and to what extent the use of images is popular and helpful in social coding platforms. We mined nine years of data from two popular software developers' platforms: the Mozilla issue tracking system, i.e., Bugzilla, and the most well-known platform for developers' Q/A, i.e., Stack Overflow. We further triangulated and extended our mining results by performing a survey with 168 software developers. We observed that, between 2013 and 2022, the number of posts containing image data on Bugzilla and Stack Overflow doubled. Furthermore, we found that sharing images makes other developers engage more and faster with the content. In the majority of cases in which an image is included in a developer's post, the information in that image is complementary to the text provided. Finally, our results showed that when an image is shared, understanding the content without the information in the image is unlikely for 86.9\% of the cases. Based on these observations, we discuss the importance of considering visual content when analyzing developers and designing automation tools.

翻译：视觉内容（如图像和视频）已以多种方式渗透至通用社交网络，极大简化和丰富了在线交流。我们旨在探究图像在社交编码平台中的流行程度及其帮助性。通过挖掘两大知名软件开发平台（Mozilla问题跟踪系统Bugzilla及开发者问答最知名平台Stack Overflow）九年的数据，并辅以对168名软件开发者的问卷调查以验证和扩展挖掘结果，我们观察到：2013年至2022年间，Bugzilla和Stack Overflow中包含图像的帖子数量增加了一倍。此外，共享图像使其他开发者更积极地参与内容，且响应速度更快。在大多数包含图像的开发者帖子中，图像信息与文本内容互为补充。最后，结果表明，当共享图像时，86.9%的情况中若不借助图像信息难以理解内容。基于这些发现，我们探讨了在分析开发者行为及设计自动化工具时考虑视觉内容的重要性。