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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.
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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
I went to the site but it was all just squiggles.
Deleted
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.
...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.
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".
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...
The apple doesn't fall from the tentacle rape tree?
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.
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
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.
There was a very popular drama, novel and movie (just forget about the movie version) that was based on some events that took place on those forums. Just look up Densha Otoko.
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 came here for the scholarly analysis of 4chan's ancestry, and I am not disappointed.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR