Fortress Bilibili

[carlo 137]

This morning I had the seemingly innocuous idea to leave a comment on a video I liked on Bilibili. What happened next blew my mind.

First, I had to register an account and verify it by linking it to my phone number and email. Ok, I thought, just some extra security, should have expected that. No problem.

 

Then, it told me that in order to comment on a video, first I had to 转正. That is, get my new account promoted up a level. In order to do that, there’s a 100-question exam (I kid you not) where a pass consists of at least 60 correct answers.

 

Being it a lazy Saturday morning, I thought, ok, let’s do this. How hard can it be? It turns out, a lot harder than the old advanced HSK. Many questions are in 网络语言 and are totally incomprehensible to an old fart like me — 文言文, or 甲骨文 would have been easier. It also asked me physics trick questions (“how tall is a six-foot person travelling at half the speed of light?”) and at what level of videogame X do you get to play against character Y.

 

After a lot of googling, I got my pass and level 1 badge. Only to find out that, sorry, your level is still not high enough to leave a damn comment. Bye.

 

Most social networking sites do everything possible to make it easy for people to interact. This is almost comically the opposite. It must rely on a subculture of people who take this as seriously as the Gaokao? Not that the other comments I saw on my video were obviously all from PhDs though. So I must be missing something....

[feihong 467]

There’s a great podcast episode about Bilibili that explains the whole quiz thing: https://supchina.com/podcast/ep-57-bilibili-the-youtube-of-china/. It is very much intentional.

[PerpetualChange 144]

The point is to keep foreigners out. Just like most Chinese social media. 

[889 1,540]

Can you tell us where on that 37-minute podcast there's the discussion about the quiz?

[mungouk 756]

12 hours ago, carlo said:

In order to do that, there’s a 100-question exam (I kid you not)

 

That's rather astonishing!

 

Is there some kind of online sub-culture that helps people to answer this? 

 

How can even clued-up locals be expected to complete it, or does it only appear if you're outside PRC?

 

 

 

 

[feihong 467]

The reason for the quiz is to maintain their particular type of community and not become just another social video site. You can find the details at 23:50 of the podcast episode. Apparently the original quiz was much harder and you had no chance of passing it unless you were a hardcore anime fan.

[carlo 137]

@feihong Thank you, I’ve listened to the podcast — I’ll read the 20F. I feel like an alien, but now I know there is/was an A站 too. Maybe I just have to accept that I'm not worthy. 🙄

[BING-饼 2]

Hi Carlo,  at beginning this website is designed for anime fan. Even their name bilibili is come from an anime. And with the same reason they use "coin" but not "like". So, they use this quiz to protect their culture. Not only you, some Chinese people also can't pass this quiz by their own. 😂Is a way to select the user. Actually the quiz is much easier resent years, because this company become more and more commercialization

[carlo 137]

Thank you Bing, I appreciate that (now). Unfortunately my anime knowledge kind of ends at Princess Mononoke. But I did pass after studying hard. 我会继续努力的 💪

 

They say they had 130 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2019, but they don’t disclose how many passed the test. It's a very interesting/ crazy business model.

[Dlezcano 25]

Besides from being able to leave comments, is there any other advantage from registering in Bilibili?