Social media comment streams deliberately obscure content to build community

Evidence

Bilibili is designed specifically to generate an aesthetic of intensified confusion while offering users a mode of social navigation and connectivity in the here and now. User-generated streams of live commentary—called “bullet comments” or “rolling comments”—and emojis are superimposed in real time onto accelerated (running in fast-forward mode) video. They aim to create a community around the content shown, while at the same time obscuring the videos they seek to explain. Bullet comments are reminiscent of the bucket-shop ticker tapes around which the first public spectacles of speculation were staged. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 184

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The image of commentary obscuring the thing it explains, yet creating belonging through that shared obscurity, could seed a scene in fiction where a community’s actual content is unknowable but its members bond over the noise.
• XREF: Directly connects to reader’s stated goal of tracing speculation’s migration from trading floors (bucket-shop ticker tapes) into everyday media. — connects to: Live overlaid commentary builds community while deliberately obscuring shared content — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 289