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

Community management is critical for community stakeholders to collaboratively build and maintain the community with socio-technical support. Existing work mainly focuses on the community members and the platform; little work explores the developers who mediate the relationship between the platform and community members and build the tools to support their community management. In this study, we focus on third-party developers (TPDs) for the live streaming platform Twitch and explore their tool development practices. In 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 redirect the attention from tool users to tool developers regarding community management and propose close collaboration with the platform and professional developers and streamlining the development process with unified took kits and policy documentation.