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

Jie Cai, Ya-Fang Lin, He Zhang, John M. Carroll

TL;DR

It is argued that HCI research should shift its focus from tool users to tool developers with regard to community management and 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.

Abstract

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.

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

TL;DR

It is argued that HCI research should shift its focus from tool users to tool developers with regard to community management and 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.

Abstract

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.
Paper Structure (41 sections, 2 figures, 3 tables)

This paper contains 41 sections, 2 figures, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Tool Development For Online Community Management
  4. Third-Party Developers and Collaboration
  5. Third-Party Developers on Discord Working for Twitch As the Research Context
  6. Methods
  7. Data Exploration and Pre-processing
  8. Topic Modeling
  9. Thematic Analysis
  10. Positionality Statement and Ethical Consideration
  11. Findings
  12. Design Ideas Exchange and Innovation
  13. Streamer's Need and Design Ideas
  14. Exchange Design Ideas Among TPDs
  15. Impact of Twitch Technical update
  16. ...and 26 more sections

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: A screenshot of the TwitchDev server on Discord. (A) the list of 193 active developers online; (B) a user with many different tagged roles verified by the server administrators such as developer and extension developer; (C) various channels for developers to discuss and collaborate on technical issues related to bot development.
  • Figure 2: Topic Modeling Results: (a) Result of Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering Dendrogram. The x-axis represents the clustering results of sample data, with numbers indicating the quantity of samples contained within each cluster. The y-axis represents the similarity during the merging of different clusters, where greater distance signifies lower similarity. (b) Result of Coherence Model. The x-axis represents the number of topics, and the y-axis represents the coherence score.