China’s Bilibili is taking its distinctive video-community model to international audiences. The most fascinating part isn't the videos. It is the idea that a platform can deliberately make participation harder—and become stronger because of it.
For years, Silicon Valley built social media around one principle:
Remove friction.
Make registration effortless.
Make posting effortless.
Make commenting effortless.
Make sharing effortless.
The logic was straightforward: every additional obstacle costs users, and every lost user is a lost opportunity for advertising revenue.
Bilibili took almost the opposite approach.
Before Chinese users can become "official members" with access to features including commenting and its famous floating danmaku comments, they must pass a 100-question multiple-choice membership examination. Users need at least 60 correct answers. The test covers community etiquette as well as questions spanning interests such as anime, music, fashion and technology.
And the experiment has produced an extraordinary number.
As of March 2026, Bilibili reported 291 million official members who had passed the examination. Those members maintained roughly an 80% 12-month retention rate.
Now Bilibili is pushing further into international markets.
Its international service has already been available across parts of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia, and reports indicate that the company has now begun rolling out a broader international app.
And that creates an intriguing experiment:
What happens when a platform that deliberately creates friction enters a global internet that has spent two decades eliminating it?
The Internet's Most Unusual "Terms and Conditions"
Imagine opening a video platform and being told:
You want to comment? Take an exam.
Not a CAPTCHA.
Not an email verification.
Not "prove you're human."
An actual test.
One hundred questions.
Get 60 right.
Then you may participate fully in the community.
That sounds absurd by the standards of Silicon Valley.
Yet Bilibili's numbers suggest something important is happening.
The examination isn't merely an anti-spam mechanism.
It is functioning as a cultural filter.
The company is effectively telling new users:
Before you participate in our community, learn how the community works.
That is a radically different philosophy from the dominant social-media model.
Why Bilibili Needed the Exam
The answer lies in one of Bilibili's defining features.
Danmaku.
Unlike conventional YouTube comments, which generally sit beneath a video, danmaku comments travel across the video itself at the moment they are posted.
They become part of the viewing experience.
If someone writes something funny, thousands of viewers may see it at exactly the right moment.
If someone posts a spoiler, the spoiler can literally fly across your screen.
If someone posts abuse, everyone watching can see it.
If someone tries to derail the conversation, the disruption is not hidden beneath the video.
It is on the video.
That creates a brutal moderation problem.
On YouTube, a toxic commenter can be pushed below the fold.
On Bilibili, the commenter can become part of the content.
The community therefore has a direct incentive to police its own culture.
And the entrance examination is one of Bilibili's mechanisms for establishing that culture.
Bilibili Turned Friction Into a Feature
This is perhaps the most interesting lesson for Western technology companies.
For decades, friction was considered the enemy.
Bilibili demonstrates that some friction can actually increase the value of a community.
The exam creates a psychological distinction between:
watchers
and
members.
You can consume content without necessarily becoming part of the community.
But if you want to participate, you have to make an effort.
That effort changes the psychological relationship.
You didn't simply click "sign up."
You earned membership.
That may help explain why Bilibili's official members are unusually sticky.
The company's 2025 annual report says it had about 284 million official members at the end of 2025, with 12-month retention remaining around 80%.
By the first quarter of 2026, that number had risen to 291 million.
And Then There Is the Engagement
The numbers are difficult to ignore.
Bilibili reported 115.2 million daily active users in Q1 2026.
Average daily time spent reached 119 minutes.
That was an increase of 11 minutes year over year.
Its monthly active users reached roughly 376 million.
These are not niche-community numbers anymore.
Bilibili has built a massive video ecosystem around a very different philosophy of online participation.
And there is another milestone.
In 2025, Bilibili achieved its first full year of GAAP profitability, reporting net profit of RMB1.19 billion after a RMB1.36 billion net loss the previous year.
That matters because the argument against community-first design has traditionally been economic:
"You can't grow a massive platform while putting barriers between users and participation."
Bilibili's trajectory complicates that argument.
The Platform Doesn't Just Want Users. It Wants the Right Users.
This is where Bilibili's strategy becomes particularly interesting.
Most social networks optimise for:
more users → more engagement → more advertising → more revenue.
Bilibili appears to place greater emphasis on:
the right users → better community → deeper engagement → stronger retention → monetisation.
That distinction is enormous.
A platform with 500 million users who hate each other may be less valuable than a platform with 300 million users who genuinely enjoy belonging to it.
Community quality can become an economic moat.
Bilibili itself describes its community as a core competitive advantage and reported more than 17 billion monthly interactions in Q1 2026.
The company isn't simply selling videos.
It is selling belonging.
But There Is a Huge Problem With the Global Expansion
The Chinese model has a critical advantage:
the exam is part of the culture.
Users understand what Bilibili is.
They understand danmaku.
They understand the etiquette.
They understand the references.
They understand the community's expectations.
A new international user does not necessarily have that cultural background.
And reports about the new international app suggest that the global experience does not replicate all aspects of the Chinese membership system.
That creates the most fascinating question surrounding the expansion:
Can you export the Bilibili community without exporting the barrier that helped create it?
If the answer is no, Bilibili may discover that its greatest strength was never simply its technology.
It was the culture created around that technology.
Bilibili Is About to Run a Giant Social Experiment
This makes the global expansion much more interesting than another Chinese company launching an international app.
Bilibili is effectively testing two different models.
China:
High cultural familiarity + entrance exam + strong community identity.
International markets:
Lower entry barriers + unfamiliar users + different internet cultures.
If the international version grows rapidly but develops significantly more toxicity, spam and low-quality interactions, Bilibili will have learned something profound.
The entrance exam wasn't merely bureaucracy.
It was part of the product.
The YouTube Comparison Is Unavoidable
YouTube built the largest video platform in history by making participation extraordinarily easy.
Create an account.
Upload.
Comment.
Subscribe.
Share.
The result is extraordinary scale.
But scale brings enormous moderation costs.
YouTube has invested heavily in automated systems, human moderators, policies and enforcement mechanisms to manage billions of pieces of content and interactions.
Bilibili's model asks a different question:
What if you prevent some of the problems before people become full participants?
It won't eliminate abuse.
It won't eliminate trolls.
It won't eliminate spam.
But it potentially changes the incentives.
A troll who has to spend time learning the community rules before gaining commenting privileges has already encountered a small cost.
A genuine fan may happily pay that cost.
A malicious actor may not.
That is an interesting form of adversarial filtering.
The Exam Also Creates a Psychological Barrier
There is something else happening.
People value things they work for.
A digital badge can be meaningless.
But if 100 questions stand between you and full participation, passing the exam becomes a tiny achievement.
The user can tell themselves:
"I'm an official member."
That creates identity.
And identity is incredibly powerful on social platforms.
People don't merely use communities.
They defend them.
They develop inside jokes.
They create rituals.
They reject outsiders.
They produce content for one another.
Eventually, the community itself becomes part of the product.
That is extremely difficult for competitors to copy.
But Don't Romanticise the Model
There is a danger in turning Bilibili's entrance exam into a technological miracle.
The platform's success cannot be attributed to one test.
Bilibili has a massive content ecosystem, a strong anime/comics/games heritage, professional and creator-generated content, recommendation systems, live streaming, gaming and other businesses.
Its 2025 annual report describes 368 million monthly active users and 112 million daily active users for the full year, while average daily time spent reached 108 minutes.
The exam is one component of a much larger ecosystem.
And there are legitimate criticisms.
A community entrance exam can become exclusionary.
It can privilege people familiar with particular cultural references.
It can create an artificial hierarchy between "official" members and everyone else.
And if the platform expands globally, questions about moderation, privacy, censorship and cultural adaptation will inevitably follow.
So the lesson shouldn't be:
"Every social network should force users to take a 100-question exam."
The lesson is more nuanced.
Social Media Has Forgotten That Communities Have Culture
This may be Bilibili's biggest challenge to Silicon Valley thinking.
Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and X have enormous differences, but they share a fundamental characteristic:
their communities are largely open.
Anyone can arrive.
Anyone can post.
Anyone can comment.
The platforms then attempt to regulate behaviour afterward.
Bilibili experimented with regulating the entrance itself.
That's a profound philosophical difference.
Instead of saying:
"Join first. We'll teach you the rules later."
Bilibili says:
"Learn the culture. Then become part of the community."
That sounds inefficient.
But perhaps inefficiency is exactly what makes it work.
The Global Launch Could Be the Real Test
The Chinese Bilibili experiment has already generated remarkable numbers.
The international expansion is where the hypothesis will be tested.
Can Bilibili maintain its community identity when its audience becomes culturally heterogeneous?
Can danmaku work across languages?
Can moderation policies translate?
Can the company build the same sense of belonging among users who did not grow up inside Bilibili's anime, gaming and internet culture?
And most importantly:
Will international users accept a platform that tells them they have to earn the right to speak?
That may be the hardest question.
Western internet culture has spent years moving in the opposite direction.
The expectation is immediate participation.
Instant comments.
Instant likes.
Instant reactions.
Instant virality.
Bilibili is effectively asking users to slow down.
The Most Interesting Part Isn't the 100 Questions
The deeper lesson is about friction.
Technology companies have spent decades trying to remove every obstacle between a user and an action.
Bilibili demonstrates that removing friction isn't always the optimal strategy.
Sometimes friction protects value.
A paywall protects premium content.
A password protects an account.
A university entrance examination filters applicants.
A driving test ensures minimum competence before someone gets behind the wheel.
Bilibili's exam applies a similar concept to online community participation:
demonstrate that you understand the rules before you receive the privileges.
It is unconventional.
It may also be one reason the platform has developed such a strong community identity.
And Now Bilibili Is Coming for the World
This is why the international expansion deserves attention.
Bilibili isn't merely another YouTube competitor.
It represents a different philosophy about what a video platform should be.
YouTube asks:
How many people can we bring in?
Bilibili increasingly appears to ask:
How deeply can we connect the people who are here?
The first model produced unprecedented scale.
The second is attempting to produce unprecedented belonging.
The global expansion will reveal which philosophy travels better.
Perhaps Bilibili will eventually remove more barriers as it expands internationally.
Perhaps it will discover that Western users refuse to take the test.
Perhaps it will redesign the exam for different cultures.
Or perhaps something more interesting will happen.
Millions of users might discover that they actually like earning their membership.
The Bigger Lesson for YouTube
YouTube should be paying attention.
Not because it needs to copy Bilibili's 100-question test.
It doesn't.
But because Bilibili is demonstrating that community quality can itself be a competitive advantage.
The next generation of social platforms may not compete only on:
- video quality;
- recommendation algorithms;
- creator payouts;
- advertising;
- AI tools;
- or subscriber numbers.
They may compete on something harder to quantify:
How does it feel to belong here?
That is something algorithms cannot easily manufacture.
It has to be designed.
And sometimes, paradoxically, the best way to build a community is to make people work a little harder to enter it.
Bilibili has already made 291 million people pass the test.
Now the world is about to become the experiment.
The question is no longer whether Bilibili can go global.
The question is whether Bilibili's culture can survive globalization.
And if it can, YouTube may have a much bigger problem than another video competitor.
It may be looking at a completely different blueprint for what the next generation of the internet could look like.
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