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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?'"
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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
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
2chan(nel) is the forefather to 4chan. They've diverged significantly, but each has a /b/ and about the same amount of furry/tentacle/rape content. 2chan's just Japanese.
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!
You should keep in mind that lots of people in Japan are accessing the web on their phones. I think that's why so many sites there are still very simple, without a lot of bells and whistles.
2ch has over 10x the traffic Slashdot does - it's by far the biggest forum in the world. So, uh, yes?
Why won't slashdot let me change my terrible username
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.
I can think of another popular site which is similarly stone-aged in its technology. You can't post images. Or Flash. There's a very tight limit on how much you can put in your signature. You can't edit your posts. You can't even have an avatar. At all. They've only lately been rewriting the site to use contemporary web technologies, to bring it out of the nineties; many of the users complained vehemently, and it still doesn't look quite right.
And yet I reckon 100% of Slashdot regulars use this site... regularly.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.