Slashdot Mirror
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?'"
...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).
Slashdot is peanuts compared to 2channel.
No, it is not. Futaba Channel is the forefather of 4chan. It has the domain name "2chan.net", but it is never, ever referred to as "2chan" in Japan, only "Futaba Channel".
Furthermore, not even Futaba Channel is all that much like 4chan. It doesn't have a "/b/" - it has several boards with that in the URL, but they are quite different beasts in practice. They are not named "Random" or anything like it, either, but "nijiura".
No, it was not. It was created as an English version of Futaba Channel, a completely different site.
2ch is 2channel. that's the BBS in the article.
2chan is futaba. that's not the BBS in the article.
2ch has only text boards.
2chan has both text and image boards.
4chan has both text and image boards, and is based very heavily off of the concept of futaba.
TFA said the guy is making about a million USD a year.
moot proves your theory wrong, 4chan has at least three times (or more!) the userbase of /., while at the same time they have made only legal/CYA concessions (no lolicon, no 'invasions').
This is the site where the Densha Otoko saga played out.
Well, another one of the most visited site in the world has no "Web 2.0" content either.
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.
The problem is 2ch is a very narrow demographic. It gets 500 million *page views* per month, but when you consider that each user of the site probably hits about 100 pages a day, that's really not that many visitors in the grand scheme. 2ch users are really, really hardcore. They're known for it; I mean this is common knowledge in Japan, the same way if you tell someone you're a Slashdot user here, they automatically form a mental picture of you (assuming they've heard of it). There are plenty of competing BBS sites that are actually more mainstream but have fewer page views because their users are not quite as... "dedicated", I guess.
I'm sure there *is* marketing going on in 2ch, but it's not mainstream marketing and never will be. And any info gathered there wouldn't be very useful because, well, it would only apply to 2ch users. And they're just not very representative of the Japanese population.
Still, I'm sure companies *do* read 2ch for instant reactions to their products, in the same way, say, a game maker in the US might read the comments on Kotaku to see reaction there. They know it's not really indicative of overall sentiment, but yeah, it's useful. But the bulk of the marketing budget still goes to TV, print, and traditional online banner ads, because that's how you reach the most people, and a fairly broad cross section of them (targeted, of course, however you'd want your message to be).
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.
In Japan, people don't go against the court. It just doesn't happen. So there's no real mechanism for dealing with it when it does.
He is testing the government right now, but they won't let it go on forever. If Japan is good at anything, it's enforcing societal rules. They just need a mechanism in place for doing it. It all has to be by the book, at least as far as the public's aware.
For the case of 2ch, there are a plethora of specialized software(Japanese link) used to browse the message boards. For the occasional readers and posters on PCs, the web page interface is enough, but the more prevalent posters use the specialized software. For example, on Windows/Linux, I would use moz2ch, a plugin for Firefox/Mozilla that reads 2ch. On OSX, I would use CocoMonar, etc. These software packages have kind of obviated the massive need for a Web 2.0 style interface for 2ch.
Futaba and 2channel are quite dissimilar. And dis.4chan.org is many years younger than 4chan itself.
"Do some fucking research?" That's hilarious. Try clicking that "homepage" link.
Here's the deal. If he feels like not showing up at work, he doesn't get paid. If he can't pay the bills, then he will go bankrupt. However, that's not as much the case with a court order, especially in Japan.
The reasoning is that libel lawsuits require a monetary damage claim in order to go to court in Japan. The basis being that money is the only truly tangible item that can be calculated to right a wrong. Plaintiffs can add on a request for a redaction, an apology, or in the case of a news media a redaction or admission article. But that alone with no monetary claims will get you diddly squat in the courts. So the plaintiffs demand a monetary figure.
After the courts slap you with a monetary penalty (not really a penalty, it's damages), it's up to the plaintiff to collect it, not the court. True, the plaintiff can go back to court and claim that the payment isn't being made, in which case the court will tell the offender to pay up, again. In short, a waste of time. There are certainly ways to FORCE a payment (going to court and getting a court order to collect from his bank account, or auction off his personal belongings) but that is just more legal trouble. Add on to that that Nishimura probably doesn't make any money and thus doesn't have the financial power to pay in the first place, making such a court order useless anyways. (The trick is that he lives off an expense account from the company he runs. The company wasn't the defendant and the court can't order the company to pay up.)
That, on top of the big issue that the RULING itself was the important part for the plaintiff in most cases, and not the monetary compensation. Once there's a ruling, they can openly tell everyone that it WAS libel, and the courts agreed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futaba_Channel
You apparently don't have any internet skilz0r if you can't even run a web search.
(this is where I would comment about free karma if I was registered)
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.
Squiggles? I went there in 2005 and it was just boxes! They've come a long way.
I'm replying to you, but this is a reply to everyone in this sub thread.
I currently work for a Japanese web design firm. Talk about a headache when writing sites, Japanse phones maybe be fast, but they're browsers are utter crap. There's almost 0 CSS support. You can't just write one site and then link to a "mobile" sheet because you can't link. You have to write a whole new page. So that's not the reason that there's so much 1.0 crap out there. (for those of you interested: http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/binary/pdf/service/imode/make/content/xhtml/HTML_XHTML_taglist.pdf A pdf of tags and atributes that you can use)
The Japanese alphabet (kana) is divided up into 10 main sounds 1 ranges the vowels A-I-U-E-O, 2 is Ka-Ki-Ku-Ke-Ko and sharp will give you the voiced Ga-Gi-Gu-Ge-Go, etc.
Let's say I want to type the word for "bank" which is ginkou. I hit 2 twice, then the sharp key, then 0 3 times (fo the non-voweled n) by this time, it's shown up on the predicta-text and I chose it and I'm off to the next word. Also, since there are no capitol letters in Japanese reversing through backwards speeds things up more.
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?!