This paper examines 2,991 GitHub projects over two years before and after each project adopted its first bot. Bot adoption was followed by more repeated collaboration, greater recognition of specific bots in discussions, fewer conflict cascades, and more distinctive outputs. The authors interpret these measures through institutional theory: repeated engagement, social memory, and role differentiation may help bots become part of a project's social infrastructure. However, the study has no untreated comparison group, so the findings are precisely timed associations rather than causal effects. The paper also reports that human-side capabilities explain the bot-conflict association, but not the bot-distinctiveness association.
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