This case study breaks down “How tiktok enables the formation of social connections and communities that contribute to the growth of the one piece anime fandom.
Hi Macaellah, awesome presentation on One Piece and TikTok.
I like the connection you’ve drawn between people’s desire for social community and TikTok – it’s similar to what I was looking at when I was studying MCU fans. User Generated Content seems to play a big role in that community formation, as you pointed out around 08:30. TikTok provides the space for this UGC. Do you think that, in the larger digitally networked public (Boyd, 2010, p. 39), this has changed the way communities form among One Piece fans since the show’s initial release in 1999 (Ritchie, 2026, 00:17)?
The separation between key theories in your presentation makes them much easier to understand. Algorithm, UGT, SIT, and Affordances are remarkably different concepts despite all being important for building community among One Piece fans on TikTok. I wonder if there are examples that combine all these theories into one post? And if that one post would be more popular than other posts within the community that only interact with a couple of the key theories?
At 02:49, you outlined how TikTok uses “features such as clips, views, likes, audio, saving content, sharing content, commenting, and hashtagging” as algorithmic inputs that determine what is displayed on a user’s For You page. I understand that the For You page changes what kinds of content are produced: users no longer rely primarily on reverse-chronological feeds, and instead of the whims of the machine, which in turn relies on what users interact with (Vera & Ghosh, 2025, p. 2). In your research, have you found any particular reasons that the For You page encourages immitation (Ritchie, 2026, 07:25) as a focus for user engagement, given the diversity of features and affordances of the platform?
References:
Boyd, D. (2010). Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications in A Networked Self: Identity,
Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (pp. 39-59). Routledge. http://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203876527-8/social-network-sites-networked-publics-affordances-dynamics-implications-danah-boyd
Ritche, M. [Macaellah Ritchie]. (2026, April 24). One Piece presentation M. R [Video]. YouTube.
Vera, J. A., & Ghosh, S. (2025). “They’ve Over-Emphasized That One Search”: Controlling Unwanted Content on TikTok’s For You Page. Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25). Ithica. pp. 1-8. https:doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713666
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