Saturday, August 27, 2011

An Island of Internet Nice

My wife is a big fan of Asian drama. She watches far more on dramacrazy.net or mysoju.com than she does on regular 'mrcn TV. One interesting little community phenomenon is the user contributed captioning that some of the sites have, where viewers can basically type messages that get seen by others when they watch later. I'm not sure of the particulars, but I believe it's done through Viki.com membership.

Example:

What struck me was how un-horrible the captioning added by the users was. None of it was overtly defacing, and Stef said she has hardly even seen anything inappropriate. Maybe I've just read too many forum/youtube comments, but I'm a firm believer in John Gabriel's internet anonymity hypothesis. To find a pocket of like-minded (albeit niche) enthusiasts behaving like actual adults made me smile.

3 comments:

  1. Haha this is great! Thanks for update and support!

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  2. Indeed what a striking anomaly! If only more of this could take place in the world eh ... sigh :(

    That said its maybe a little less surprising given some very polite cultures in Asia (in some regards, all Asian cultures have their down sides as do all western cultures as well). I don't know whether the shows/site you reference are Japanese or South Korean or Chinese ... but depending on which that might have a little to do with how nice everyone is.

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  3. What I would expect:
    DICKS, DICKS EVERYWHERE

    What apparently happens:
    PEOPLE ACT DECENT

    I'm as surprised as you are! I expect part of it is that the usual demographic of bored, scatological baby-sociopaths have zero interest in this genre and thus pretty much all the viewers are genuine fans.

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