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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?'"
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reason, quite many Japanese sites, specifically message boards and chat rooms (tcup for instance), are completely outdated.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...
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