Third-Party Developers and Tool Development For Community Management on Live Streaming Platform Twitch

Community management is critical for stakeholders to collaboratively build and sustain communities with socio-technical support. However, most of the existing research has mainly focused on the community members and the platform, with little attention given to the developers who act as intermediaries between the platform and community members and develop tools to support community management. This study focuses on third-party developers (TPDs) for the live streaming platform Twitch and explores their tool development practices. Using a mixed method with in-depth qualitative analysis, we found that TPDs maintain complex relationships with different stakeholders (streamers, viewers, platform, professional developers), and the multi-layered policy restricts their agency regarding idea innovation and tool development. We argue that HCI research should shift its focus from tool users to tool developers with regard to community management. We propose designs to support closer collaboration between TPDS and the platform and professional developers and streamline TPDs’ development process with unified toolkits and policy documentation.