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How Japan's Biggest BBS Keeps Things Simple
Posted by
timothy
on Wed May 21, 2008 02:51 PM
from the by-ignoring-them-mostly dept.
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?'"
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OMG!!!! He's missed the boat! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:OMG!!!! He's missed the boat! (Score:5, Funny)
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MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh, the irony. Please, stop, it's killing me. (Score:4, Insightful)
Third Party Moderation (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You missed the point... (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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Re:No I Didn't (Score:5, Insightful)
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But... The REAL question is (Score:4, Funny)
Re:But... The REAL question is (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But... The REAL question is (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:But... The REAL question is (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:But... The REAL question is (Score:5, Informative)
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".
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Re:But... The REAL question is (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:But... The REAL question is (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:But... The REAL question is (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:But... The REAL question is (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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This is quite interesting actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:This is quite interesting actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree, it's a revolutionary idea. Maybe he can call it "USENET".
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NNTP (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:This is quite interesting actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an interesting concept and there's a lot to be learned about it, but I doubt it has a lot of practical applications since it's so far removed from reality for most people.
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Re:This is quite interesting actually... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This is quite interesting actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
And removed from reality? Dude, 2ch is very mainstream in Japan. It practically makes its own reality.
This is where internet communication is going. Bulletin boards and imageboards where anonymity is the default and where pointless individualism is deprecated, even derided. (ever been called a namefag? well now you have, namefag.)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is 2ch is a very narrow demographic. It gets 500 million *page views* per month, but when you consider that each user of the site probably hits about 100 pages a day, that's really not that many visitors in the grand scheme. 2ch users are really, really hardcore. They're known for it; I mean this is common knowledge
Re:This is quite interesting actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:This is quite interesting actually... (Score:5, Funny)
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Meh. I don't see the attraction (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Meh. I don't see the attraction (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Funny? Insightful! (Score:4, Interesting)
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BBS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:BBS? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [synchro.net] about a year ago. I got re-insterested in BBSes after watching that History of the BBS documentar
Re:BBS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer: this is something that I originally wrote on a BBS [citadel.org]. 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.
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Re:BBS? (Score:5, Insightful)
BBS's weren't just about messaging, they were based on providing a social space, a third place if you will. The 'net has supplanted that function but not replaced it.
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Re:If it isn't local, it isn't a BBS. - bullshit! (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Favorite Real Life Quote: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Favorite Real Life Quote: (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Favorite Real Life Quote: (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Japan just likes it 1.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Japan just likes it 1.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, Japan has a much larger percentage of technophiles than we do in the US, so it's definitely not out of the question that even if it was horrendously implemented, then there's still a large percentage of the population who would do it anyways.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Home of densha otoko (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Home of densha otoko (Score:4, Informative)
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Since Slashdotters can't use Google (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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why are people reacting to its simplicity? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:why are people reacting to its simplicity? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can think of another popular site which is similarly stone-aged in its technology. You can't post images. Or Flash. There's a very tight limit on how much you can put in your signature. You can't edit your posts. You can't even have an avatar. At all. They've only lately been rewriting the site to use contemporary web technologies, to bring it out of the nineties; many of the users complained vehemently, and it still doesn't look quite right.
And yet I reckon 100% of Slashdot regulars use this site... regularly.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"Do some fucking research?" That's hilarious. Try clicking that "homepage" link.
Re:You could never do that in America (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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