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

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).