state of the smile
accepting the decay of niconico, treading in amber, also requires contextualizing that nico actually does still exist, despite the rallying cry from loyalists when it first returned from the blacksuit hack two years ago. part of the reason I have been reluctant to document more of the decay, besides my own disappointment with the platform, is that the trajectory has not had particularly amazing contours to discuss on the ride down. to experience nico at most points since its return, particularly from overseas, is a misery. nicopedia, one of the more useful primary sources for subculture research and one this site has leaned heavily on, fell behind a geofence earlier this year. unlike the nico seiga block before, which was at least granted a notice stashed on a help page, the restriction was only something I was able to verify through a support email chain. the pain this has pooled with me, as the last overseas user that subscribes to premium, is undoubtedly a rounding error that didn’t deserve even this much recognition. more difficult to accept, to the tune of premium subscribers hemorrhaging below a million total, is the bulldozing of tens of thousands of videos in the name of moral standards.
product managers miraculously do still work for dwango, which is finally starting to ship new wrinkles. this month saw the soft launches of both nico shorts, approximately five years too late to feature any cosplay beauties hitting the 踊ってみた, and AI comment agents that have been seized on by the inmu factions with the deepest-rooted brainworms. shorts are, depending on your charity, a lazy clone or a play to reclaim some of the portal site supremacy that once drove japanese web services to grow. truly new functions, and not shufflings and sunsets, are rare enough from nico that the appetite to compete on the merits, by delivering on feature parity and satisfying whatever users are diligently filling in feedback forms, is truly an unusual play for them to run. given that we are two weeks out from the launch and I’ve already found myself exhausted of shorts to watch, thirty second cuts of vocaloid PVs might be outflanked anyway by the distilled allure of sopranos clips and vox pop captured with a lapel mic.
having stochastic parrots run across the site as first-class users, both inmu fans and AI comment agents, is strangely forward-facing for what we should accept is the actual medium-term trajectory of all online networks. most large platforms, we mostly already accept with some disdain, are overrun with bots and agents. youtube has not yet had the same courage to accept that bots may one day do our commenting and watching for us entirely, likely because it is still the breadwinner to verifiably human attention. by most measures, nico has always been comment gore, and much of the functionality and behaviors one would now assign to the identity of the site were seeded from participants that internalized themselves as outcasts willing to fill text boxes with just about anything, so it is not difficult to understand the enthusiasm to grease the gears this way. nico, now filling the void to pretend there is activity on it worth caring about, has a freedom to rediscover itself as this sort of freak show, one that layers comments over videos and has paginated search results, if it accepts that it already has little to lose by faffing about. faffing about, unfortunately, is not cash flow positive, or entirely reassuring to premium users like me that feel as though they are accepting a PNG award for being the biggest sucker alive. when a hole is filled with garbage, I would usually prefer turning away from the garbage, rather than diving head first into a landfill.
chokaigi, the super festival that puts its best foot forward as a celebration of all things nico, has been spared from these discomforts. when you forget the premium subscriber bleed and the payment processors feuds, it actually took on more sponsors than ever this year and was sanitized enough to be powered (again) by visa, after it had absconded with JCB. for every year I have tuned in to multi-stream drift the weekend, it is a reminder of the heights that nico can reach when it takes serious aim at being a celebration of creators and free culture, even as the event has scaled back, likely because it can pull on influencers further out of its orbit than the ones that directly interact with it and also because it has lived long enough to diverge from the site itself. two-day events at the makuhari messe stroking nostalgia, able to deftly weave hare hare yukai and bon odori, do not have to contend with tech debt or attempting to court uploaders to the creators support program. ZUN beer doesn’t spoil when the man drunkenly sips it while dancing along to paranoia. hiroyuki, too, will gladly show up for any chance to schmooze for a camera, even when his audiences course through youtube or traditional broadcast and he has been less than shy to spit on his video service failson. that any event anywhere in the current micro-audience landscape, past the expiry of the vidcons and ROFLcons that made attempts at celebrating a collective net culture, manages to slot vtuber foot bath consultations into the timetable without seeming too weird speaks to an overarching endurance and quirkiness that lacks representation elsewhere. for a longevity not too far off from the site itself, back to far more innocent and crude fads unencumbered by discourses du jour, it is a touch impressive that it manages to preach sincerity for bizarre and disparate net cultures while also avoiding being entirely cloying or cynical of them.
warm fuzzies for what is operatively a 2008 class reunion can carry you quite far, up to hiroyuki having to perform his best george bush shoe dodge this year. despite that it is sometimes difficult to judge who the event is really targeted towards, attendance has actually crawled out of a post-corona hole that dwango really wants you to know is bucking trends seen on the site itself. while I’ve suggested before that nico has focused its retention efforts on festival events, chokaigi is a reminder for how much physical events are also a credence to the approach, particularly when the grand narrative around online subcultures has coagulated almost entirely around virtual spaces. the last decade has decayed online platforms as destinations, with links no longer having an effective currency that makes them powerful enough to overcome platform incumbents. comparison shopping of different federated wastelands, we would be honest to admit, has an appeal that will always be limited to the type of person that chews the fat, the way only eventers might harangue the makuhari flatlands being a default venue for large events like chokaigi when it is simply an average of conveniences. youtube might not have scrolling comments, or a pizza command, but it does have edge cache servers that do not buffer at the fear of seeks during playback.
if you are a concerned netizen that wishes more people would move against the axis of digital evil, or you are a suit in the marginal digital services division of kadokawa fighting for relevance, it is foolish to believe that migratory patterns can take flight on the web now as swiftly as they may have when services like plurk and friendfeed were things worth going to bat for. the soreness of a falling bluesky, or whatever a nostr instance is, have been dogged by this reality to an extreme that I frankly underestimated would be enabled by polite company that can simply shrug off the harms weaponized by the largest platform incumbents. physical manifests like chokaigi and creator cross are, when I have stewed more on their cadence and their value anchored to a failing website, an optimistic hedge on a future for platforms that is also being expressed in vocacolle and nico’s other digital festivals: users assembling when the occasion meaningfully prompts them to, rather than as aimless daily routine. dwango has competitive leverage here against platforms that have already “right-sized” the humans and difficulty of physical logistics out of their processes. whether there is enough clarity to apply this vision with a full depth, or if the creatively-titled japan music vocaloid powered by dwango heading to los angeles is afforded mostly by the japan creator support slush fund, is an opportunity that largely rests with dwango’s management seeing enough sunlight to guide people out of algorithmic spirals and dark forests online. mentions of expansion in kadokawa’s IR reports, likely really aimed only at satisfying a line item about global presence, have so far chosen to sit on vocaloid’s silver age as this potential path out. forgive me, rattling in my geofence cages and trying to convince a new generation of hungry overseas vocaloid fans that vocacolle actually exists, for being more than a touch skeptical.
chokaigi alone, after the ZUN beer hangover, is unlikely to reverse the health of nico’s vitals. part of the demotivation encoded in the modern web is that comsuming an abundance of outputs, now able to be summoned in our own personal realities, can feel more enriching to our time and efforts than the prospect of planting kusa or pissing into an ocean with a blog post that no one will read. nico’s bet, in part, is that a little bit of generated piss is as much a part of assembling the ambiance in an old metropolis to a degree that will excite creatives to return, in some cases now sitting at the top of billboard charts with a longing for its past glory. safer engineering may be more difficult to achieve, with some understanding that closing maintenance tasks does not win over users or mend a well-deserved reputation for rot. away from agile development, the events teams within dwango is where you can find the grit actually building and maintaining the relationships that allow it to cosplay as a creative force. for the loyalists pissing away paid annual subscriptions on being able to resume playback and a watch history that lasts for a whole 180 days, a chance to remind people with a high-profile event that nico has not yet succumbed is an excitement itself.
there is not really a tremendous solidity to theory crafting against platforms, or that kadokawa has a compass stronger than the threat of their next activist investor. still, the dynamic enveloping the ruins of nico today is, plainly, weird and scatterbrained. nico historically has been at its most fun when it has stumbled, or been forced to discover creative band-aids. if fan festivals and doujin fairs adorning the dwango name are the next international frontier, then I will surely continue to also look forward to peering through the VPN slit to observe VIRTUAL SEX jokes, for reasons that remain inexplicable to every party involved. there’s still hope that I might see it all explode spectacularly some day soon.