zedsville writes "Hi, I'm Chris Baker and I'm an editor at Wired, and we just posted a story that I thought might be of interest. 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?"" Link to Original Source
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