Video-Based Evanescent, Anonymous, Asynchronous Social Interaction: Motivation and Adaption to Medium

Danmaku is an emerging socio-digital media paradigm that puts anonymous, asynchronous user-generated scrolling comments on videos. (How) can danmaku afford the illusion and realization of social interactions, if at all possible given its interactional incoherence nature? To answer this question, we collect Chinese danmaku users' reflection on their motivations to use this social service and explore the actual practices that meet the needs. According to a preliminary danmaku usage survey, users consider it as an information seeking and emotion venting channel. Through archival analysis of real-world data, we find that danmaku commentaries are relatively short, video-centric, saturated with emotions, and similar in syntactic and semantic features. Users have developed a set of mechanisms adapted to the medium, to leverage such text-based messages to foster interpersonal and hyperpersonal communication for sharing of facts, thoughts, and feelings.