
Bullet Time - hecubus
https://logicmag.io/07-bullet-time/
======
francislavoie
I had a Chinese roommate during university, I learned about this stuff from
him. His desk was right by mine so I got to see a lot of this comment spam
scrolling past the screen. It was a pretty interesting experience. I
definitely thought it was pretty intrusive, I don't even like my cursor being
on the screen when watching any video fullscreen. But I did think it was still
really neat, you get a similar kind of social high from it as being in a crowd
at a concert for example - you see everyone's reactions right when something
climactic happens in the video.

This article did a much deeper and more detailed dive on the topic than what I
heard via my roommate. I had no idea it had a proper name or the history
around it, etc. Neither did I know the political/social implications.

He told me about the test to get on Bilibili, and he said he knew some people
who spent a ton of time to study to get in, and even more who failed.

The experience of it can be somewhat closely resembled to watching the twitch
chat of a very popular streamer who has subscriber-only mode enabled. In other
words, 95% of the useless spam cut away from the free users, but still so much
text flowing by that any real conversation is impossible. It's really just
reactionary stuff. Someone else in this thread commented that the language
density (less characters, more meaning in Chinese vs English) and the fact
that scrolling text has a set duration not affected by other comments make it
so it's a lot easier to keep up by just reading the periphery. E.g. on Twitch,
the next comment pushes up the previous, so if it goes too fast you can't read
anything at all, bullet comments take, say, 5 seconds to scroll from edge to
edge (not sure on the specifics of the timing).

------
dugditches
Youtube used to have something similar with annotations.

You'd get videos spammed with them covering the screen.

But some uploaders used them to make something akin to DVD menus. Being able
to skip to other videos or timestamps in a longer video.

Looks like Youtube removed it this year. Pity since it also served as a way to
'edit' or correct videos. Instead of putting it in the Description/Comments
hoping to be read.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The way YouTube annotations were used could tell you a lot about the character
of people whose videos you were watching. On average, not many good things.
Overall, getting rid of them made the YouTube experience significantly better,
though as you say, losing corrections was an unfortunate collateral damage.
They should've just auto-appended them to video descriptions with timestamps
on them - the way many music compilations have a list of constituent songs
with clickable timestamps.

Unfortunately, after removing annotations, YouTube added a really obnoxious
popup with recommended videos that shows up whenever you pause the video,
obscuring a good 1/3 of it. It's like they really want people to hate them.

------
iforgotpassword
> In fact, many of them actually have Bilibili’s exact bullet comment feature,
> which was open-sourced by the company in 2015.

I'm curious how much stuff we're missing out on because it doesn't appear on
our radar. It has happened a handful of times so far that I googled something
and ended up on a github repo that had a Chinese readme only. Only from
context I could guess what it was about. And I wouldn't even be surprised if
bilibili had an English readme for their stuff.

~~~
oposa
A lot. But isn't that big of a concern (but being curious is a great thing
overall). There always going to be things are obscure, irrelevant or hidden.
But that isn't what people are missing these days. Almost everything that you
would need is available in one form or the other.

What you should be concerned about is the things hidden in plain sight. Things
that are there but you can't appreciate because you don't understand the
context, it challenges an already held view or is something you can't
practice.

There countless comment on hacker news over at least the last five years
trying to explain why less things are happening in the west and more things
are happening in China. So no one should be surprised that there are things
going in China that we don't appreciate. Still it is usually met with
disbelief.

...

On a more practical note, just translate it. I might not work out, but poking
things often gives you more information than you had before. Or it may at
least can actively confirm what you were thinking in the first place. That is
sort of the original hacker mindset.

------
taneq
Sounds like a live tv version of Twitch.

~~~
needle0
Trust me, the difference between the comments vertically scrolling in the
sidebar and horizontally on top of the video is huge. In Twitch, when the
comments become fast enough they literally give no time for the viewer to
parse and understand most of them; With bullet comments plus Asian languages
that have high letter-to-meaning ratio (or at least with my experience with
Japanese on Niconico), each of the comments horizontally scrolling on top of
the video leave just enough mental processing time to read through the
majority of them and to grasp the atmosphere of the commenting hive-mind more
clearly. This creates a sense of togetherness that is much more tight-knit
than what you get from Twitch comments.

~~~
lifthrasiir
One complicated reason why horizontally scrolling comments are not more
widespread is a patent.

Dwango has two related patents (Japanese patents no. 4695583 & 4734471), so
competitors had to work around them; most prominently, FC2's Himawari Douga
was able to escape the trap by moving an input form inside the video
(something Dwango was unable to secure due to prior arts) [1]. But this was
hard win, and probably it is much safer to avoid horizontally scrolling
comments at all. I'm aware of several Korean and Japanese video websites that
have rejected this system exactly due to patent concerns.

Interestingly though, Bilibili and many other Chinese video websites do use
the very same comment system as Niconico! More amusingly it is legal because
Dwango's patents are dated on December 2006 and that was before the Chinese
Patent Law has amended on 2008 to much broadly acknowledge foreign patents
[2]. As a result they are free to use the system without a patent issue [3],
and it is probably partly why they got popular in China.

[1]
[https://news.yahoo.co.jp/byline/kuriharakiyoshi/20180926-000...](https://news.yahoo.co.jp/byline/kuriharakiyoshi/20180926-00098303/)

[2] [https://www.ipo.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/DragonGetsNew...](https://www.ipo.org/wp-
content/uploads/2013/03/DragonGetsNewIPClaws.pdf)

[3] [http://www.acgn-
globalbiz.com/entry/2019/01/06/%E5%8B%95%E7%...](http://www.acgn-
globalbiz.com/entry/2019/01/06/%E5%8B%95%E7%94%BB%E9%85%8D%E4%BF%A1%E3%82%B5%E3%83%BC%E3%83%93%E3%82%B9%E3%81%AB%E3%81%8A%E3%81%91%E3%82%8B%E3%82%B3%E3%83%A1%E3%83%B3%E3%83%88%E9%85%8D%E4%BF%A1%EF%BC%9D%E5%BC%BE%E5%B9%95%E6%8A%80)

~~~
mac01021
How could anyone decide that horizontally scrolling text is an idea
substantial and original enough to be worthy of a patent?

~~~
taneq
You forget that "click the mouse once" was considered patentable.

------
instakill
Already mentioned in this thread is the fact that for videos with high
frequency comments, reading vertically scrolling text becomes impossible
because they scroll too fast.

Would would be cool if video platforms allowed Reddit-style voting for 3 or 4
comments per 10/15/20 second segments that would display as bubbled up (with
viewers being able to expand for more comments for the same time slot).

That would solve the issue of comment-spam overwhelming the videos, plus it
would become an incentive for higher quality submissions.

~~~
francislavoie
Since Twitch uses IRC under the hood, it would probably take a full rewrite to
support that kind of thing. I agree though, I'd love an alternative way to
keep some comments sticky.

YouTube live chat does have a couple features to aid with that, they have
"super chats" which are basically a way to pay to get your comment to stick at
the top of the chat box, and they have a filter to just show top comments
instead of the full live feed. It helps somewhat, but obviously it's not a
complete solution.

------
ricardobeat
I built an app exactly like this a long, long time ago, when JS server push
became available and websockets didn’t exist yet, in PHP. 2010 maybe?

It made for incredibly entertaining chatter, but relied on pirated streams of
live TV, and never went past an experiment :(

------
gfody
this feels so dystopian to me. not only can the media be engineered to push
whatever agenda but so can the perceived social reaction to it - like the mind
control machine choking up its grip. of course it happens in China first

~~~
rtpg
This comes from Nico Nico (some Japanese video site) and is basically like a
live stream chat but overlaid on the video.

There’s definitely some argument about groupthink but you don’t need
coordinated state propoganda for that, people end up doing that anyways

~~~
luckylion
When the result of the groupthink is centrally controlled, it opens up a big
avenue for manipulation, though. I mean, it's not that different from
traditional media telling you "what people think", but probably feels more
real because it's interactive.

