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?'"
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reason, quite many Japanese sites, specifically message boards and chat rooms (tcup for instance), are completely outdated.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.
Futaba Channel is itself an offshoot of 2channel, so 2channel can be said to be the grandparent of 4chan.
Yeah, I thought it was an old-school BBS, too, after reading the headline...
That being said, there are plenty of BBS's still running, you just telnet to them now (99.9% of the time, I'm sure there's still a couple 'true old school' ones around). And many of them have plenty active communities, classic door games, etc, etc.
As a matter of fact, I was playing around with BBS server software called Synchronet about a year ago. I got re-insterested in BBSes after watching that History of the BBS documentary and having a wave of nostalgia hit me. Synchronet is a 'classic' BBS (telnet connection), has an HTTP, NNTP, FTP, GOPHER, and IRC connections among other things. It's pretty cool.
Disclaimer: If you couldn't tell I'm not officially connected with Synchronet in any way, just enjoyed some time at the vert.synchro.net BBS, and playing around with the software.
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
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
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.
Of course, maybe he won't be able to either, in the long run. Who knows? I wish him luck, that's for sure.
He'll be put in jail eventually. It's not some big secret that he has all these judgments against him - he's pretty roundly despised by the mainstream for flouting society and law like that. (This is Japan, remember.)
Every once in a while you hear things out of Japan about someone finally deciding to deal with him, but then it never happens. One of these days, though, it will. And he won't like it when it does; Japan has a way of putting people in jail and forgetting about them. Not that many people ever end up there in Japan, so those that do are treated basically like non-persons from then on.
As someone who used to "read" 2ch.net, lemme tell you...
It's over rated. Imagine slashdot with WAAAY more -1 and 0 rated posts. Lots of trolling. No, that's an understatement. 90% of threads are taken over by trolls and name callers (including racial insults), even the originally interesting threads.
The majority of responses are 1-liners of little value. Most threads are actually cross-threaded to hell and gone so even if you find a new thread, the first message is a summary (with links) too all the threads that lead up to this new one so you're usually lost trying to follow any conversation.
Great ASCII art from the trollers though.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
There is also a 2ch-like site for English language users, 4-ch.net. It's an interesting contrast to observe, how differently westerners (mostly yanks) behave on an anonymous messageboard.
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.
Posting anonymous for obvious reasons.....
I do marketing in japan. We're all over it. Part of it is damage control, part of it is getting a grasp on what people like to see, which (surprise surprise!) is often not what we thought would be of interest.
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.
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.
So, ways to use javascript of which I can come up with right now:
:D, it really sucks the worst! (I'm not registered, but from the small things I can see.. it's like web 95 all over again..)
* raise window
* resize window
* disable right click
* remove buttons and toolbars and stuff like that
* force people to open images thru javascript
* stupid disabled textarea boxes which the browser can't undo if you close the tab by accident or similair
* clocks, text in status bar, crap like that.
Uhm, ok, so those all suck.
"Quick reply" are decent but considering all the times I've lost my text I'd prefer to never use it.
So the only good kind of javascript I know of are the one which lets me moderate here on Slashdot without scrolling up/down and choose moderate. Oh, the awesome feature!
Except that? It always suck, I can't come up with something more good atleast.
Code perversism because it's "fun" or "cool" to do something and not because it will benefit the user or make the user interface / information retrival better SUCK.
So please tell me when it doesn't suck. (Without it our browsers would be more compatibla and less bloated aswell I guess.)
Flash suck aswell.
Midi background sounds or flash with sounds are one among the most sucky things there is.
Myspace are probably the most elite of sucky things
I want to be able to click back and come back to my text area. I want to be able to open all my screenshots in new tabs in the background and look at them later / when they have loaded. I can decide how I want my windows myself thank you. I don't need hovermenus which sometimes fucks up / you can't click the item / whatever because some sucker didn't know what he was up to when he made the stupid menu.
Just give me plain hypertext documents with support for images and download links for all other data.
No, this site is all just squiggles. I strangely keep going back for more...
sudo eat my shorts
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.