research paper

Pastebin use on FLOSS social media, and the downsides

A pastebin is a web site where developers can paste in some code, get back a URL, and then share that with others. The usage of pastebins is handy for IRC chat or in email, when a lot of source code will look ugly or be unformatted. However, the pastebin URLs disappear over time and this presents a problem for those of us who collect old data, or want to study the software evolution.