[NetBehaviour] How Japan's Biggest BBS Keeps Things Simple.

[marc garrett]

How Japan's Biggest BBS Keeps Things Simple.

An article on Wired proves 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?'

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-06/mf_hiroyuki