Kendra is a Chinese user behavior consultant, and Creative Tech Director at Trivium China, a political and economic analysis shop.  She's been lu

UI vs. Loneliness: Barrage Video (弹幕) and China’s “Empty Nest Youth”

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2024-12-03 18:00:04

Kendra is a Chinese user behavior consultant, and Creative Tech Director at Trivium China, a political and economic analysis shop. She's been lurking around the Beijing tech scene since 2004.

Ideas are mysterious things. Sometimes the worst ones smell like solid gold, sometimes the profit-driving powerhouses masquerade as giant turds. Telling the difference, it seems, takes a certain measure of psychotic genius. Where, for example, is the hazy boundary of brilliance that separates the Slinky from, say, Picnic Pants?

Maybe I just have no vision, but if you’d asked me to guess which one of the two was gonna sell a few million units, I’m telling you right now, I would have guessed wrong.

“Hey, I know,” said someone in a design meeting once, “How about we let users post live comments as they watch their favorite shows. Then we could scroll those comments across the viewport so they cover the entire screen, like a curtain of enthusiastic verbal abuse?”

That’s right. That’s a conversation between hundreds of users, laid over the top of a video player, while the video is playing. Someone implemented that. Someone institutionalized that chaos, and what’s worse, they did so with great success. The feature is called danmu (弹幕), and it’s the hottest thing going in Chinese streaming media UI.

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