Bullet Time | Hacker News Reader

Bullet Time

logicmag.io

109 pointshecubus25 comments

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).

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.

Wasn't that open only to the video's uploader though?

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.

Much of the time it was used to create full screen transparent links to other videos, or other obnoxious things decreasing QoL. Still sad to see it go though.

> 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.

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.

Sounds like a live tv version of Twitch.

Yep, and Twitch has something similar when replacing Past Broadcasts, a viewer can layer their comments into the sidebar chat in real-time.

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.

So the increased density of languages like Japanese actually translates to faster reading comprehension? I guess I'd always assumed that concepts-per-second would be about the same even if one language took up more physical space per concept than another.

I've seen some videos on Niconico with English comments but those were a lot harder to read. Perhaps concepts-per-second between EN/JP are similar if reading a static page, but English text tends to use more characters than JP text that express the same idea, making the system scroll it faster and thus harder to read as they whiz by. Maybe it's a Niconico issue and the system is tuned to reward comments in the typical JP length to be the most readable; I'm not sure.

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...

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

[3] http://www.acgn-globalbiz.com/entry/2019/01/06/%E5%8B%95%E7%...

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

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

> Asian languages that have high letter-to-meaning ratio [...], each of the comments horizontally scrolling on top of the video leave just enough mental processing time to read through the majority of them

This is what emotes are for, no? Most of the comments in a traditional Forsen stream are emotes and I'd argue that they give you a pretty good idea of the atmosphere of the chat.

It's also common for Twitch streamers to upload their videos to Youtube, and overlay the Twitch comments onto the video. This can have the same sort of subjective impression as the bullet comments described here, although it's less interactive (since there's less emphasis on non-live comments).

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.

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.

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 :(

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

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

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.

[flagged]

the article also highlights the Chinese government's interest in the phenomenon. the risk of this "drug" being used against the people is pretty realistic in China over places where the internet is free and open.

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