Bilibili turned the danmaku comment into the whole point of watching together

Danmaku — 'bullet comments' — began in 2006 at Japan's Niconico, where viewer comments scrolled live across the video frame instead of sitting below it. AcFun brought the format to China in 2008; in June 2009 Xu Yi, an AcFun power user, set up his own site (MikuFans, renamed Bilibili in 2010) in a rented Hangzhou apartment after AcFun's servers kept failing. The format and the frustration-escape community fused into a subculture.

The danmaku layer changes what a video is: comments appear at the exact moment they were written, so watching feels simultaneous — researchers describe it as 'watching a match in a bar with strangers' — while anonymity lets people say what they would not offline, and viewers co-create the experience as amateur subtitlers and effects artists pace comments across the frame.

The community became the product: by its 2018 Nasdaq listing, Bilibili had 70 million-plus monthly active users, roughly 82% born between 1990 and 2009, and had turned danmaku ties into a creator economy of ACG content — gaming, anime and music. The IPO raised about $483 million, and the bullet-screen comment, once a niche trick, had become the emotional architecture of Chinese video culture.