  Open Source Software (OSS) projects rely on a continuous stream of new
contributors for their livelihood. Recent studies reported that new
contributors experience many barriers in their first contribution, with the
social barrier being critical. Although a number of studies investigated the
social barriers to new contributors, we hypothesize that negative first
responses may cause an unpleasant feeling, and subsequently lead to the
discontinuity of any future contribution. We execute protocols of a registered
report to analyze 2,765,917 first contributions as Pull Requests (PRs) with
642,841 first responses. We characterize most first response as being positive,
but less responsive, and exhibiting sentiments of fear, joy and love. Results
also indicate that negative first responses have the literal intention to
arouse emotions of being either constructive (50.71%) or criticizing (37.68%)
in nature. Running different machine learning models, we find that predicting
future interactions is low (F1 score of 0.6171), but relatively better than
baselines. Furthermore, an analysis of these models show that interactions are
positively correlated with a future contribution, with other dimensions (i.e.,
project, contributor, contribution) having a large effect.
