ADAPTIVE GOVERNANCE BY DIGITAL PLATFORMS: HOW TWITCH CHANGED ITS PLATFORM OVER TIME

Abstract

Since its launch in 2011, the live streaming platform Twitch has continually expanded its mechanisms for monetizing interactions between content creators and their viewers. While numerous studies document the motivation of viewers (Sjöblom, et. al. 2017; Wulf, et. al. 2020), experiences of live streamers (Taylor, 2018; Sjöblom, et. al., 2019; Woodcock & Johnson, 2019), and platform policy (Partin, 2020; Poell, et. al., 2022), an explanatory framework and a clear timeline of functional changes on Twitch is still missing. Tracking Twitch changes can shed light on what motivates them, and what is likely to influence the platform going forward. The literature on Twitch platform policy focuses mainly on how the platform mimics features that were first introduced by users, a process Partin (2020) called “envelopment”. However, we argue that there are two important parallel mechanisms that motivate change. First, via competition, Twitch copies features from other platforms. Second, via realignment, Twitch meets user demands for changes on the platform. This process of strategic cooptation of features via envelopment, competition, and realignment, is what we call adaptive governance. It is this holistic approach of adaptive governance that remains a blind spot in the literature and which this article aims to give a first description of.