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How Japan's Biggest BBS Keeps Things Simple

Posted by timothy on from the by-ignoring-them-mostly dept.

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?'"

21 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. OMG!!!! He's missed the boat! by hal9000(jr) · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, he's not very Web 2.0, now is he?

    1. Re:OMG!!!! He's missed the boat! by moderatorrater · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah. Without moderation to show whether a comment is interesting or insightful, how will people ever be able to set the threshold higher to make sure that they never see unpopular opinions?

  2. This is quite interesting actually... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:This is quite interesting actually... by Shagg · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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 agree, it's a revolutionary idea. Maybe he can call it "USENET".

      --
      Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
    2. Re:This is quite interesting actually... by MagikSlinger · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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
    3. Re:This is quite interesting actually... by Daimanta · · Score: 5, Funny

      he majority of responses are 1-liners of little value. You must be new here.
      --
      Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
    4. Re:This is quite interesting actually... by Lueseiseki · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, and now you can go to 4chan and find pictures of girls' locker rooms! Technology 1, Women 0.

  3. Meh. I don't see the attraction by Colin+Smith · · Score: 5, Funny

    I went to the site but it was all just squiggles.

    --
    Deleted
    1. Re:Meh. I don't see the attraction by glgraca · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's amazing what an illiterate society can achieve. I bet they don't reveal to each other that they can't read because they are ashamed of it, so everybody keeps scribbling just to keep face.

  4. BBS? by kharchenko · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:BBS? by colesw · · Score: 5, Funny

      I had the exact same thought, I was wondering how many phone lines he had. :(

    2. Re:BBS? by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Disclaimer: this is something that I originally wrote on a BBS. So it's appropriate but not an "original for today."

      The BBS never really died. Thats a myth perpetrated by Slashdot (if ever there were a central repository for groupthink, Slashdot is it) as well as self-proclaimed pundits in the tech trade rags who are always waxing eloquent about the "next big thing." Sure – the Internet did change the world, and it continues to do so. But when it comes to people interacting with each other online, that process began when Ward Christensen and Randy Suess put their first system online in 1978, and it has continued uninterrupted since then. It moved from dialup to the Internet.

      Today, various developers are finding new and innovative ways to optimize their messaging platforms for different audiences. For example, millions of American teenagers are now BBS users: they are all subscribed to a large BBS called MySpace. Responses to this assertion which begin with the words "But MySpace isnt a BBS, its a" will be summarily ignored because they indicate that you havent given more than ten seconds of thought to the subject. Forums, chat, email doesnt all of this sound more than a little bit familiar? Even the "BBSs are from yesteryear" groupthink over at Slashdot is particularly ironic, considering that Slashdot itself is basically just a big BBS optimized for the reporting and discussion of tech news.

      You can call it a BBS, or you can call it groupware, or you can call it "social software" (the new favorite buzzword for the tech marketing dweebs). Call it whatever you want but its basically the same thing. Messaging is messaging. Its just a question of how you optimize it for your audience.

      --
      Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
  5. Favorite Real Life Quote: by VeNoM0619 · · Score: 5, Funny
    This is by far my most favorite real life quote:

    . '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. Pretty much along the lines of... yea... I'm just not gonna show up to work anymore, I don't feel like it. No I didn't quit, I'm just not gonna show up anymore. Bills? Yea I really don't feel like paying those anymore either, so I'm just not gonna do that anymore...
    --
    Disclaimer: I am not god.
    We may not be created equal
    But we can be treated equal.
    1. Re:Favorite Real Life Quote: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Here's the deal. If he feels like not showing up at work, he doesn't get paid. If he can't pay the bills, then he will go bankrupt. However, that's not as much the case with a court order, especially in Japan.

      The reasoning is that libel lawsuits require a monetary damage claim in order to go to court in Japan. The basis being that money is the only truly tangible item that can be calculated to right a wrong. Plaintiffs can add on a request for a redaction, an apology, or in the case of a news media a redaction or admission article. But that alone with no monetary claims will get you diddly squat in the courts. So the plaintiffs demand a monetary figure.

      After the courts slap you with a monetary penalty (not really a penalty, it's damages), it's up to the plaintiff to collect it, not the court. True, the plaintiff can go back to court and claim that the payment isn't being made, in which case the court will tell the offender to pay up, again. In short, a waste of time. There are certainly ways to FORCE a payment (going to court and getting a court order to collect from his bank account, or auction off his personal belongings) but that is just more legal trouble. Add on to that that Nishimura probably doesn't make any money and thus doesn't have the financial power to pay in the first place, making such a court order useless anyways. (The trick is that he lives off an expense account from the company he runs. The company wasn't the defendant and the court can't order the company to pay up.)

      That, on top of the big issue that the RULING itself was the important part for the plaintiff in most cases, and not the monetary compensation. Once there's a ruling, they can openly tell everyone that it WAS libel, and the courts agreed.

  6. Re:But... The REAL question is by Goaway · · Score: 5, Informative

    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".

  7. Japan just likes it 1.0 by FornaxChemica · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:Japan just likes it 1.0 by zedsville · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  8. Re:But... The REAL question is by Paranatural · · Score: 5, Funny

    The apple doesn't fall from the tentacle rape tree?

  9. Re:But... The REAL question is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  10. MOD PARENT DOWN by __aagbwg300 · · Score: 5, Funny

    He's on to us.

  11. Re:But... The REAL question is by iMacGuy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 :(