Patterns of Bot Participation and Emotional Influence in Open-Source Development
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.11138,
title = {Patterns of Bot Participation and Emotional Influence in Open-Source Development},
author = {Matteo Vaccargiu and Riccardo Lai and Maria Ilaria Lunesu and Andrea Pinna and Giuseppe Destefanis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.11138},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
The 7th International Workshop on Bots and Agents in Software Engineering (BoatSE 2026)