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How Japan's Biggest BBS Keeps Things Simple
zedsville points out an article at Wired proving that plenty of people (at least in Japan) are willing to brave BBS environments without all the fancy layers to screen out spam or online provocateurs: "It's a profile of Hiroyuki Nishimura, the man behind the Japanese site 2channel. Nishimura set up the simplistic BBS in 1999, when he was an exchange student in the USA. The site has no registration or web handles or moderating, no mechanisms to filter out flames and trollish behavior, and no mechanisms to help users find the most insightful comments and topics. But this ugly, lo-res site gets about 500 million pageviews a month. Nishimura doesn't police the contents of posts to his bulletin board, which has resulted in numerous libel claims. 'I used to show up in court,' he says. 'Then one day I overslept, and nothing happened. So I stopped going.' Nishimura has lost about 50 lawsuits and owes millions of dollars in penalties, which he has no intention of paying. 'If the verdict mandates deleting things, I'll do it,' he says. 'I just haven't complied with demands to pay money. Would a cell phone carrier feel responsible when somebody receives a threatening phone call?'"
Well, he's not very Web 2.0, now is he?
I don't think those 2chan'ers want to get into a libel suit. I think they're just after his assets, if you know what I mean.
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I think an interesting moderation system would be a third party website that has all the content submitted to the original site, but then applies some moderation system (whether staff moderators, or some public rating system, or whatever) to present a moderated view of the content. Any forms for feedback would send submissions directly back to the original website's servers, which the third party would then get along with everything else it moderates.
How could that third party moderator be responsible for the content of the site? It's not soliciting the content or running the community. It's just reporting what others are saying.
US law says that unmoderated Internet content confers no liability for that content on the publisher (though you might have to back that up on in some expensive, annoying court sessions if you got sued). But evidently there are other courts and laws that disagree with that policy. Maybe there's another structure that's more universally defensible.
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make install -not war
Can it withstand a Slashdot onslaught?
Deleted
He has put the equivalent of a black board and a box of chalk on the Internet and only erases things the court orders him to. A rather interesting and unfiltered reflection of society.
I'd think that marketing people would be all over something like this. Want to know what people really think of companies/products/people etc. look at these blackboards and learn. Marketing data that can't be achieved in probably any other situation.
Sure, it has a high noise level, but just the same, if there is a lot of noise surrounding the object you are studying it says something about that product/company/service/law etc.
I like it
I went to the site but it was all just squiggles.
Deleted
...it gets that many visitors exactly -because- it's not moderated. Exactly -because- you can be the greatest douchebag on earth on there and neither 1. fear getting your identity exposed (which is accomplished on Slashdot via Anonymous posts) nor 2. your post getting moderated away.
Yeah, they'll delete posts if ordered to, but that's about it. Sit back, update the software once in a while to deal with vulnerabilities, and rake in the... well I'm not sure what they rake in... ad profits? popularity? But rake on, regardless, 2chan guy(s).
I was all excited to read about a BBS that's still running .. and being popular. Wow ... wait, your old-school, simplistic BBS is actually just a web site .. with tons of banners, flash and other crap. Man, I am getting old!
4chan.org was created as an English version of 2ch.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
For some strange reason, quite many Japanese sites, specifically message boards and chat rooms (tcup for instance), are completely outdated. They've been created in the mid or late 90's and never been upgraded since then. The trend might be gradually reversing but it isn't going fast and there doesn't appear to be a major interest in the Web 2.0 (nicovideo.jp is a good Japanese YouTube though). It's quite paradoxical to think in some aspect Japan is so low-tech on the web. But then again the most interesting sites are not always the ones on the cutting-edge...
In America's suit-happy society those who sued him and won would find some way to enforce the collection, even if it meant getting a court-ordered seizure of assets. Anyone with enough money to pay a large Internet bill like that has enough money to pay a small- to medium-sized judgment.
In America, such sites have 3 choices:
1) stay small enough not to be "judgment proof," where it's not cost-effective to go after you.
2) go corporate, and all that that entails
3) run and hide, like the spammers do
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
sage goes in all feilds
where's the tentacle pron?
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
TFA said the guy is making about a million USD a year.
Read the whole story on one page. (Auto-generated from the Wired story)
someone tag the article ebaumsworld
This is the site where the Densha Otoko saga played out.
I didn't miss the point. Just because a site is popular doesn't mean it's good. I wouldn't want to use that site. The measure of a site's success or value, especially to its users, is not merely how much money it makes in a year.
What I proposed might be used to take all the 2channel content and present it with useful moderation, but without the liability that its unmoderated version also avoids.
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make install -not war
Well, another one of the most visited site in the world has no "Web 2.0" content either.
I heard you rike mudkips?
He's on to us.
i think Nishimura is a pretty cool guy, eh skips court hearings and doesn't afraid of anything.
You've obviously forgotten the whole point of a BBS: It's local to a specific area, usually designated by an area code. This locality is enforced by the fact long-distance calls were really expensive back in the day and you could only make so many before breaking your (parents') bank. The Internet, even back in the old days, was not local and the BBS users of that era realized that. There was no cohesion around area codes or even general regions of the country. The BBS users of that era knew that the Internet would kill the local aspect of networking, and some of them even predicted the death of the Internet because of that.
Dial-up BBSes still exist, but when's the last time you called one? When's the last time you saw one advertised? Are there any running in your area code?
(The limited hours of operation and the limited number of phone lines are also part of the whole experience but the local flavor is essential. Telnet shell accounts, even the ones with ANSI that call themselves BBSes, lack that, even if they replicate the other features.)
How can you use my intestines as a gift? -Actual Hong Kong subtitle.
sage
there's comments here moderated up that express shock that such a primitive site is still a draw in japan
are you forgetting google and its text only ads? i think there were people who scoffed at that too. i mean who didn't love flashing banner ads in 1999?
are you forgetting craigslist? i mean if anything, craigslist proves you need flash flashing everywhere to be a successful website in the usa, right?
folks: most people resent all the extra cruft on the web, even if they won't consciously admit it. who cares about the bells and whistles? who cares about web 2.0?
the essential value of the internet is what it does, not what it looks like. function is way more valuable than form. utilitarian usefulness always trumps flashy empty aesthetics
of all crowds, i would have thought slashdot would have appreciated this concept. but no
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Here if you don't do that, they come and take your house/salary and then toss your butt in jail for contempt.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They started out as pictures and morphed into the the written language they have today. It makes it a lot more difficult to learn then a language that has a defined alphabet.
Anyway, I think that assertion is dead wrong. I sure as hell wasn't "local to a specific area" by choice - it was just because of the economic realities of amateur computer networking in that era. BBSes were local because that was the only affordable option. There's nothing inherent about a BBS that requires it to be local, it's just that when run over POTS it worked out that way - because otherwise, for anything you might actually want to do on a BBS, you'd quickly wind up racking up hundreds of dollars in long-distance fees.
If their local nature was an inherent part of BBSes, then why did software authors try to overcome that? (For instance, networking the message boards of different BBSes together, propagating the messages with a nightly dial-out script...)
The technical limitations of most BBSes back in the day were consequences of economic factors, not conscious design choices. Nowadays, online forums are generally "local" to shared interests rather than shared geography. I find I have a lot more in common with computer programmers in the California or modelers in the Philippines than I do with a lot of people who happen to live in the same calling area as I do...
Bow-ties are cool.
You don't "keep things simple" by becoming a fugitive from justice.
That's guaranteed to make things very complicated, sooner or later.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
As I'm sure you're all aware there is an English equivalent to the Futaba channel (2channel). http://www.4chan.org/ -Anon(ymous Coward)
My head just exploded.
/b/, 2chan, 2channel, 4chan, futaba... This is the first time ever that I don't understand a single comment in a whole slashdot-story.
What the hell is everyone talking about? BBS,
Man, the internet is weird. Could it be that I lost my 1337 5k11z about the time I started to do earn money?
And, no, I didn't RTFA. Given I don't even understand what the summary is about, I don't think it'll help me much.
I'm amazed more sites don't use a NNTP server to be the backend of their forums. NNTP is designed to handle millions of messages with relative ease.
I guess it's the NNTP to HTTP interface that is a big headache. When you think about it, using a SQL database for something like messages is a huge waste of resources.
Ditto Internet message boards, only precisely in reverse: They’re run on advertising and (in some cases) paid subscriptions, and the only way to do that is to make them as geographically wide-ranging as possible.
There’s nothing inherent about the Internet that requires it to be global. My point is that they were local and the Internet is global, and to ignore that is to ignore one of the most salient features of the BBS world.
Yes, I’m aware of Fidonet and other efforts of that type. But the BBS world never completely broke out of the ‘local board with local callers’ mold. The Internet left it behind without so much as pausing. Perhaps ‘inherent’ was the wrong word, however.
How can you use my intestines as a gift? -Actual Hong Kong subtitle.
I wish searching in Japanese was easier, but this site is an almost godlike source of knowledge about anything. From finding links to torrents to getting instructions on how to change settings on your keitai(cell phone), 2ch kicks ass.
The site is setup well in that clicking a link redirects you to a page displaying the actual offsite link address and letting you know it is going offsite. It puts a level between the site and the linked content which likely reduces liability and adds to overall security of the user.
The text only interface is rather unique for even Web 1.0 forums, but it allows fast loading, quick reading(well, as quick as you can read Japanese), and removes all the annoying clutter like avatars, images, signatures, and emoticons from view.
To say this site is not moderated doesn't cover it. I have seen links to copyrighted content(sometimes the content is posted online), information on making "terrorist weapons", and even child pornography both hidden and posted explicitly without being taken down.
In the interest of full disclosure though, I also visit a lot of other Japanese forums which I prefer over 2ch due to their being organized and on topic.
Here is the story in sixty seconds: hopelessly geeky computer programmer stops drunken conduct directed against flawlessly perfect lady on train one day. She falls for him. He's freaked out of his mind and totally incapable of dealing with this situation, but his buddies on the Internet talk him through it.
Its essentially a romance comedy "based on a true story", which is actually touching at points, particularly if you understand where the geek is coming from or why it is exceptional and praiseworthy that someone would stick up for a woman he didn't know on a crowded train. The second of these makes a little more sense in Japan than it would in America, but I suppose you could do a romance comedy about alientation in the big city (isn't that, hmm, all of them?) which would be similar.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
The latin alphabet is no more "normal" than, say, the Korean alphabet.
You hit the nail on the head. Reading does a lot to improve general language skills. But the 1500 characters + their 2 or 3 readings and where to apply those readings is daunting to most people.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Just a cultural note:
I think the real signifigance of the Kim Chi Icecream hasn't been spelled out in the article, so for the ever informed slashdotters ....
The fast food chain Lotteria is owned by Lotte a large korean company. I would take the suggestion of Kimchi milkshakes as a racial slur against koreans as koreans are said to eat kimchi with every meal. This would not be something that would be said in Japan but would be a silent undercurrent of racism.
The prank was not just a "this would be horrible" idea, but also a slight against the company's origin.
It is perhaps more noteworthy that such a thing could happen for this reason, as a moderated site would not allow a prank with racist undertones to take place.
I have no problem with free speach and personally think that such a site is the perfect place for it. Keep the outbursts away from news sites etc. If I want to judge the darker side of human opinion I know where to find it.
Honestly, you can take your Web 2.0 measures of profits (whatever that buzzword-filled garbage is supposed to mean) and stick it where the sun don't shine. I'd take his measures any day if given the chance.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
oh? But each symbol can be broken down. There's a logic to it all, unlike romance and germanic languages. In English, you have to remember the spelling of each and every word, all those funny vowels screwing things up. And in Japanese, if you can't remember a kanji, hey! you've got a 50 character alphabet to fall back on and can still be understood.
The issue isn't that MySpace or whatever have similar functionality to the old-school dialup BBSes; the issue is that the term "BBS" has a very strong connotation of "independently-run messaging (and usually gaming) system accessible via POTS", referring to the BBSes of the late 80s and early 90s (WWIV and the like). Most people seeing the term "BBS" will think of that, so you've got an uphill battle if you want to use the term to refer to any similar system that runs on the Internet, and you're not doing yourself any favors by scoffing at people who say that MySpace isn't a BBS. MySpace ISN'T a BBS, according to the most common usage of the term "BBS".
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Takedown demands that are based on someone's perceived right not to be offended confuse me. Is it enshrined somewhere in law somewhere?
Actually, Korean script is really cool. Each fixed-width one-syllable symbol contains alphabetic elements that tell you how it sounds. I really recommend reading up on it.
haven't you got some other websites to troll hard?
Wow, thanks for that. I didn't get the joke before, but now that you've explained it to me, I find it funny!
Wow, thank you for that. I didn't get the joke before, but now that you've explained it to me, I find it to be funny!
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
Not so. Japan started out with a spoken language, and they wanted a way to write it down, so they stole the Chinese written language, which is what started out as pictures and morphed into more abstract symbols.
The reason Japanese is so difficult is that the Chinese symbols (kanji) were essentially shoehorned into the language.
Why is it whenever anything to do with anonymity shows up on Slashdot, people with pseudonyms pour in to give their sour grapes? Guys, we're not going to suddenly start caring about your e-penises.
I've followed 2ch for close to a decade. And its the best and worst the internet has to offer, in fact, its the embodiment of internet. Its an entire universe of unfiltered data; full of smut and porn, jerks, racism, spam, and diverse information and insight that could otherwise not flourish.
The thing is, to navigate 2ch you really need an external viewer (such as gikonavi etc). The site is too cumbersome otherwise, and with it you can add a certain degree of your own moderation and filtering to it. But you still need a thick-skin to navigate it.
One thing 2ch doesn't have is a sanitized hive-mind that, say, Slashdot has (hatred of Microsoft, Sony; love of OSS, Apple, etc.) There certainly is a much more vile hive-mind at times, but there really is no ego being that there's no log-in and you can't really get banned. There are lots of moderated forums in Japan like the US, and lots of people go to them, but 2ch is a good complement to it. Sometimes you want to hear what people really think in an environment that doesn't have the fear of being filtered, 'dugg down', or banned. 2ch really is pure internet anarchy that somehow works.
Been in Japan almost 30 years. Have never once visited 2-Channel. Signal to noise ratio is too close to garble, by all reports. Hang out at the West Exit of Shinjuku Station during rush hour for a physical demonstration of 2Ch effect on your consciousness.
Slash.dot is a model organized thought in comparison.
You're confusing Japanese with Chinese. Japan just borrowed the characters that the Chinese used, sometimes for meaning, sometimes because they had a similar pronunciation. They developed their own syllabaries by modifying the characters, which are alphabet-like in that you can write anything using those 46(?) characters. And it's really not that hard to learn; knowing only 2000 characters you can read any newspaper. Then there's Chinese, which is a completely different story. No syllabary, thousands and thousands of characters, and of course different dialects all over.
What wouldn't Jesus do?!
The problem is that if you only know the '50-character alphabet', you can't read much. Most nouns and verbs are in kanji. It would be like ****ing this *********. You may be **** to get the ******* **** of the ******** but ******** won't be able to ********** it. Only ********'* ***** will be ******** in hiragana. And believe me, it may seem like there's a logic to it, but there really isn't any consistent logic. Some characters are used for their sound, some for their meaning, and some for no reason I'm aware of. So there's no way to see a character you're not familiar with and break it down to find how it's pronounced.
What wouldn't Jesus do?!
But a lot faster to read. Why write a word out, which then has to be parsed, when a simple picture of the thing in question will do?
Pictures are just faster to process. Harder to learn, but faster to use.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They started out as pictures and morphed into the the written language they have today.
So did the Western alphabet, which is ultimately based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. A bunch of Semitic workers realised that it would be much easier to use hieroglyphs as phonetic symbols rather than as full-fledged ideograms.
The funny thing is, the Japanese actually did something similar with their hiragana/katakana characters. Unfortunately, for some reason they forgot to ditch the Chinese ideograms. So now they carry two alphabets plus a couple thousand ideograms. Tough luck.
That's what they say in the TFA
...a stunned silence fell upon the hall.
Since some time the single most useful add-ons for Firefox for me is "No Script". Next comes AdBlock.
The only visibly useful JavaScript stuff to me is the AJAX like Google maps or SugarCRM web-based GUI (Yahoo library).
...a stunned silence fell upon the hall.
Imageboards are great because they lack Web 2.0 AIDS. Unfortunately nowadays there's newfag cancer.
Now, THAT is an impressive achievement. There's a logic to it all, unlike romance and germanic languages. I have to tell you that German, Italian, Spanish are all spelled phonetically. English not.
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Wikipedia calls it an alphabet.
I've been studying it for a while.
Posting here too late to be read, probably, but:
I agree, MagikSlinger, there's a lot of crud on 2ch (and other Japanese BBS-style blogs I've read); low signal-to-noise. It's the kind of noise that makes a newbie feel he's missing a lot of subsurface meaning... but after a while, it becomes clear there's really just a lot of mindless keyboard-banging.
(*Some* forums, *some* threads, of course. There's good stuff too.)
I think the WIRED article overall tries too hard - as "cultural comparison" pieces usually do - to sell the exotic "so different from us" angle, at the expense of factuality. The subject of the article, Nishimura, is genuinely interesting; the sideline "Japanese Internet is, like, so weird!" angle is overblown. All in the interest of telling a good story, I know...
I picked some bones with the WIRED article here
http://www.homejapan.com/2008/05/wired_on_cultural_differences_tell_em_what_they_want_to_hear
and so won't bore this discussion with further opining. But for anyone who cares, this particular Internet nobody contends that "cultural difference" pieces always need to be taken with heaping spoonfuls of salt. There's too much interest among writers in concocting a good story, and too little desire among readers to cast a critical eye toward claims.
> They developed their own syllabaries by modifying the
> characters, which are alphabet-like in that you can
> write anything using those 46(?) characters.
You can write anything, as long as it sounds like Japanese.
It's not an alphabet. It's a syllabary. (Well, two syllabaries.)
A syllabary works okay for writing languages that have a strict CVCV pattern, but it's pretty much useless for writing any language that has blends or closed syllables. In that respect, it has pretty much the opposite limitations to an abjad writing system (like Hebrew), which can write blends and closed syllables but can't handle a sequence of vowels.
An alphabet is flexible enough to handle any combination of the phonemes it has letters for. That's one reason so many *different* languages can be written with (variations of) the Latin alphabet (or the Cyrillic for that matter). You may need a couple of diacritical marks or special characters to represent sounds we don't have in English, but the basic setup works for any spoken language.
The *other* advantage of an alphabet (having a limited number of symbols to learn) is shared by all phonetic writing systems, syllabaries included. But they fall short in the flexibility department. You can transliterate Japanese kana into Latin characters and back, almost losslessly. But if you transliterate English into kana and back, it gets mangled rather badly, because the kana can't handle adjascent consonants.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> The Latin alphabet is no more "normal" than, say, the Korean alphabet.
The Latin alphabet is much more *common* than Hangul, and is used to write a much larger variety of languages.
Not that this invalidates your point; Hangul was just perhaps not the best example. The Cyrillic alphabet might be a better example. It's used for a fair variety of languages (not quite as widely as Latin, but nothing is), and it's flexible enough to write pretty much any language you can write with the Latin alphabet (which is not true of, say, hiragana; not sure about Hangul, as I've not studied it in detail). There are even languages that are commonly written in either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet, depending on local preference. So they're functionally equivalent, just... different.
Besides that, someone who's familiar mainly with the Latin alphabet can easily see that Cyrillic letters do look sort of like letters (in general, even if some of them don't look like any _specific_ Latin letter). Once you get them used to the idea that letters can have different shapes from the Latin ones, you can gradually work them over to ones that look more and more different from Latin.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.