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.

翻译：社区管理对于利益相关者通过社会技术支持共同构建和维护社区至关重要。然而，现有研究主要聚焦于社区成员和平台本身，鲜有关注作为平台与社区成员间桥梁、开发工具以支持社区管理的开发者群体。本研究以直播平台Twitch的第三方开发者（TPDs）为研究对象，探讨其工具开发实践。通过结合深度定性分析的混合研究方法，发现TPDs与不同利益相关者（主播、观众、平台、专业开发者）保持复杂关系，多层级政策对其创意创新和工具开发的自主性形成制约。我们认为，人机交互研究应将社区管理视角从工具使用者转向工具开发者。本研究提出促进TPDs与平台及专业开发者深化协作的设计方案，通过统一工具集和政策文档优化TPDs开发流程。