Patterns of Bot Participation and Emotional Influence in Open-Source Development

TL;DR

This study analyzes how bots participate and influence emotional tone in open-source discussions within the Ethereum ecosystem, revealing their role in shaping developer communication dynamics.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of bot participation patterns and emotional influence in open-source development, highlighting their impact on communication timing and emotional shifts.

Findings

Bots respond faster than humans in pull requests.

Bots' interventions lead to increased positive emotions among humans.

Bots are associated with reduced neutrality and increased gratitude, admiration, and optimism.

Abstract

We study how bots contribute to open-source discussions in the Ethereum ecosystem and whether they influence developers' emotional tone. Our dataset covers 36,875 accounts across ten repositories with 105 validated bots (0.28%). Human participation follows a U-shaped pattern, while bots engage in uniform (pull requests) or late-stage (issues) activity. Bots respond faster than humans in pull requests but play slower maintenance roles in issues. Using a model trained on 27 emotion categories, we find bots are more neutral, yet their interventions are followed by reduced neutrality in human comments, with shifts toward gratitude, admiration, and optimism and away from confusion. These findings indicate that even a small number of bots are associated with changes in both timing and emotional dynamics of developer communication.