This is old news at this point, but after years of serving the "wwwww" crowd in Japan, the famous chaos machine Nico Nico Video now has an English-language site. What is so different about Nico compared to all the other video sites? Comments. Nico simply overlays audience comments onto existing Youtube videos (in Japan Nico started this way but now hosts its own video) as an ongoing, scrolling commentary in real time. This is clearly either a great idea or a terrible one.
It is well-known, for example, that Youtube commenters are a good estimate of exactly how dumb the average citizen really is. Now imagine their particular brand of awful shit scrolling back and forth across your screen. It's pretty scary.
There is something else going on, though, that doesn't happen at all with Youtube comments. You don't wait until you're done watching the video to say something. You don't even have to look away. You speak right then and there as you're watching the thing, and the comment stays there on that point in the video. Like 2ch before it, it's anonymous, so go nuts. In a weird way, this is an indirect, communal experience. Being funny on Nico is something of an art in and of itself: check out the ASCII art towards the end of this Spider-Man video.
At its best, Nicovideo is complete screaming madness. What the hell are you even watching right now? What the hell are these people talking about? Go with it. wwwwwwwwww. The closest to "American Nico" I've seen thus far is the video for Rebecca Black's Friday, a meme which by this point has been absolutely pummeled into the ground. The level of chaos is there, but, well... I don't think anybody says anything funny the entire video.
What Nico English lacks at this point is a community outside of the Wapanese population of the internet (they've already live-streamed at Sakuracon!). View numbers are crazy low: a "hit" video on here is one that reaches the thousands of views and the site hasn't had any one video really blow up yet. When you realize that Friday-- which took America by storm and has close to 140 million views on Youtube as I write this-- only has 2,000 views, you get an idea of how infetisimally small Nico is right now. Premium services have yet to be opened (I want to buy Premium so I can watch more mahjong tournaments, I admit it) because when there's this little content, who's gonna pay?
So my advice is to get on Nico. Add videos. Talk shit. Be funny. It'll be a good time.
Favorite JP nico comments moment: for whatever reason I was curious if there were any Bob Ross painting videos on nico douga, and what the Japanese reaction would be to him.
Sure enough, there were a few episodes of the Joy of Painting, and inevitably each episode would reach the point where it looked like Bob was going to fuck everything up. Colors were a mess, no clear idea where it was going, whatever. Growing up watching this stuff, we know the ending: Bob is going to make it all work, and he's going to do it in under 25 minutes. The folks on nico didn't know that.
They freaked out, with every comment from about the 5 minute mark on being some variation on "WHAT THE DICK IS THIS". Slowly but surely, opinion started to turn around by the 20 minute mark. By the end, most comments were either "Sorry, Bob!" or simply "神".
If Nico English can provide anything like that, I'll be down.
Posted by: Jason Moses | May 14, 2011 at 07:30 PM
Not sure if want. Back in my day, we figured out how to navigate Nico by clicking stuff and wildly praying we were venturing in a direction we wanted to be!
Posted by: HCPolimar | May 22, 2011 at 03:24 PM