Danmaku vs. Forum Comments: Understanding User Participation and Knowledge Sharing in Online Videos

Danmaku is a new video comment feature that is gaining popularity. Unlike typical forum comments that are displayed with user names below videos, danmaku comments are overlaid on the screen of videos without showing users' information. Prior work studied forum comments and danmaku separately, and little work compared how these two features were used. We collected 38,399 danmaku comments and 16,414 forum comments posted in 2017 on 30 popular videos on Bilibili.com. We examined the usage of these two features in terms of user participation, language used, and ways of sharing knowledge. We found that more users posted danmaku comments, and they also posted these more frequently than forum comments. Even though, in total, more negative language was used in danmaku comments than in forum comments, active users appeared to post more positive comments in danmaku. There was no such correlation in forum comments. It is interesting to find that danmaku and forum comments enabled knowledge sharing in a complementary manner, where danmaku comments involved more explicit knowledge sharing and forum comments exhibited more tacit knowledge sharing. We discuss design implications to promote social interactions for online video systems.