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ABSTRACT: The concept of platformisation has been used throughout contemporary Chinese sociology and media studies to explain the process by which emerging local digital platforms facilitate and revolutionise daily life. Scholars have also examined how fans of ACGN (anime, comics, games, and novels) create heterotopias through the development of virtual communities and the departure of online territory from more conventional cultural and heteronormative norms. This article analyses an often-overlooked subject: the mainstreaming, platformisation, and re-conventionalisation of digital platforms and their impact on creative video production and fandom culture. We investigate Bilibili, a video-sharing social media which can be considered as the former home of Chinese ACGN culture, with a particular focus on the current commercial expansion that has seen it deviate from ACGN's cultural themes. Howard Becker's (1982) categorisation of innovative creators (mainstreams, mavericks, misfits) and Jones et al. amphibians are utilised to examine the ways in which the various video creators and former ACGN fans have (or have not) adapted to the platform's commercialisation, mainstreaming, and re-conventionalisation.
KEYWORDS: digital platforms, fandom, ACGN, online ethnography, gender, queer.
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Introduction
The global influence of various digital platforms and their component tools, frameworks, and algorithmic logic, as well as the expansion of data science, has become a topic of considerable research. Previous studies have suggested that digital platforms serve as technological architectures, playing a key role in the transition from two-sided market systems to complex multisided platform arrangements (Nieborg and Poell 2018; Nieborg and Helmond 2019). Nieborg and Helmond (2018: 4275) understand this transitional process as platformisation: "the penetration of economic and infrastructural extensions of online platforms into the web, affecting the production, distribution, and circulation of cultural content."
Fandom culture is influenced by the platformisation of cultural production. The participatory nature of digital fandom, the process of presumption, the progressive elements of digital fandom (e.g., Generation Z vibe, feminist themes, and LGBT-friendly spirit), and fan practices have all increasingly been incorporated into the working mechanisms of online platforms (Jenkins 2006; Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010; Ritzer 2013). The "data-isation of online fandom" emerges from a platform's computational logic to organise and reward content providers, resulting in fans contributing to online ranking and voting, and supplying traffic statistics for their idols (Yin...