English accents of native and non-native speakers across the world have recently become an ever-growing topic being socially and academically discussed in a variety of perspectives for addressing such issues as attitudes, power, ideology, identity, and (mis-)identification (e.g., Lippi-Green 2012; Waniek-Klimczak and Shockey 2013; Chan 2016; Gnevsheva 2018; Fang 2020; Dryden and Dovchin 2021; Dragojevic and Goatley-Soan 2022; Sewell 2023). Studies along this research line, however, tend to take a perspective that “follows the logic of the prescriptive and elitist tendencies of the center linguists” (Canagarajah 1999: 180), thus collectively snowballing to build a shared metadiscursive regime in which the English accent and pronunciation of native speakers is seen as standard. Informed by accentism, critical applied linguistics, and the concept of scales (Blommaert, Westinen and Lappänen 2015; Gal and Irvine 2019), this study, by taking netizens’ commentary on English accents as indexical play, aims to explore whether, and how, amateur online commentators, or “citizen sociolinguists” (Rymes and Leone 2014), engage with scales in various ways to consolidate and maintain, or disinvent and reconstitute (Makoni and Pennycook 2006) the metadiscursive regimes of native-speakerist thought on English accents. Drawing on data in the form of videos from Bilibili.com, it shows how Chinese netizens orient to different timespaces as they comment on English accents of various types. Applying discourse analytic methods to netizens’ commentaries, questions addressed include what kinds of scaling practices are mobilized in the discussion of English accents, how virtual community is come into being, and what the ideological force behind timespaces. This study, thus, not only illustrates the productivity of scaling practices by netizens to elevate or not English accents as communicative repertoire for building community and authority, but also presents a new methodology to the study of English accents.