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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?
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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.
--
make install -not war
Can it withstand a Slashdot onslaught?
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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.
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...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!
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...
This is the site where the Densha Otoko saga played out.
He's on to us.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.