Twitch Third-Party Developers' Support Seeking and Provision Practices on Discord

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Twitch third-party developers seek and provide support on Discord, revealing platform dependence, role flexibility, and implications for managing support in online communities.

Contribution

It introduces a mixed-method analysis of TPD support practices, highlighting platform dependence and role flexibility in community support ecology.

Findings

TPDs' support practices are highly dependent on Twitch, acting as platform labor.

Switching between Discord and Twitch complicates TPDs' support roles.

Flexible role practices reflect community growth but require bridging roles for support transfer.

Abstract

Third-party developers (TPDs) often turn to online communities for support when they can't get immediate responses from the platform. Twitch, as a leading live streaming platform, attracted many TPDs and formed an online support community on Discord. This study explores TPDs' support practices via mixed method (a topic modeling to identify topics related to support seeking and provision first and a follow-up in-depth qualitative analysis with these topics) and found that: (1) TPDs' support-seeking practices around social, technical, and policy matters are highly dependent on Twitch, and this dependence acts as a form of platform labor; (2) TPDs need to switch between Discord and Twitch regarding seeking and provision, exacerbating TPDs' platform labor; (3) TPDs' flexible role practices reflect the community's flourishing on Discord but require roles to bridge the two platforms and transfer informal support seeking to possible formal support from Twitch. We propose implications for effectively managing support seeking and provision between formal and informal spaces to improve the development of TPDs. We also contribute to community support practice and to platform ecology work in CSCW.