5channel
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|---|---|
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| Text board | |
| languages | Japanese |
| operator | Loki Technology, Inc. |
| editorial staff | Hiroyuki Nishimura |
| Registration | No |
| Annual income | 100 million yen |
| programming language | PHP |
| On-line | May 30, 1999 (currently active) |
| https://www.5ch.net/ | |
5channel ( Japanese 5 ち ゃ ん ね る ) or 5ch (abbreviation based on the URL) is a popular Internet forum in Japan . Until October 2017 the website was called 2channel (Japanese 2 ち ゃ ん ね るni channeru ), or 2ch for short . 5channel has been geo-blocked in the European Union since May 2018 due to the General Data Protection Regulation .
history
2channel was founded in May 1999 by Hiroyuki Nishimura while he was a student at the University of Central Arkansas . The name of the site is a reference to VHF channel 2, the default setting for RF modulators in early video game consoles when connected to Japanese televisions.
At the beginning, the site was one of many Internet forums of the Nanashii Warudo (dt .: nameless world), a network of many different mailbox sites, which was founded in 1997 by Masayuki Shiba Ayashii World (Japanese あ や し い ワ ー ル ド Ayashii Warudo , dt .: Strange World). Ayashii World itself had already been closed at this point. 2channel used code from Amezou BBS, a particularly popular Nanashii Warudo site that had become the main point of contact for former Ayashii World users after the site was closed in September 1998. Many of the basic systems of 2channel such as the representation of the threads or the concepts of sage and age were first developed on Amezou. When Amezou BBS went offline itself in October 1999, many users migrated to 2channel. In this context, the name of the site has a wider meaning than “second channel”, with Amezou BBS representing the “first channel”.
In August 2001, 2channel was about to close, whereupon users of the site opened a replacement site called 2chan or Futaba Channel as a precaution . The peculiarity of this page was that it also allows you to post pictures, making it one of the first imageboards . Although the closure of 2channel could be averted, Futaba Channel itself gained a large number of users and soon developed its own culture.
meaning
2channel is operated in Japanese and has almost ten million users. Alexa ranks the web address 24th in Japan in June 2015. As of June 11, 2015, 2channel's system reported more than 2.4 million new contributions to the discussion.
The largest advertising agency in the world, Dentsu , has its own department to follow the posts on 2channel in order to catch current trends quickly.
Basic concepts
All participants in the discussion are basically anonymous (see. Anonymity on the Internet ), by default all posts with a uniform wildcard name (usually 名無しさん , Nanashi- san (about: "Mr / Ms untitled") or a variant thereof) published. Prior registration is not required, but you can have the forum software output your own IP address at any time , accept a pseudonym or save it (using so-called trip codes , arbitrary strings of characters that are appended to the name when you enter it, and cryptological Hash function output some kind of authentication in the name display). The founder and operator of 2channel, Hiroyuki Nishimura, considers anonymity to be necessary, because otherwise it cannot be expected that important information could be published through the media without a filter. In addition, the principle of anonymity should promote the culture of discussion by making it more difficult to assign certain arguments to certain people and in principle avoiding the consequent sliding of discussions into the unobjective form of an argumentum ad hominem . Kathrin Passig quotes Hiroyuki Nishimura: “In an anonymous system, when you criticize your own contributions, you don't know who to get angry about. If there are usernames, the long-established users tend to accumulate more and more authority and it becomes more and more difficult to represent a dissenting opinion , ”and she adds from her own point of view that on participants who rank lower in the pecking order , less with complete anonymity being hacked around. In such a system, it would also be difficult or even impossible to evaluate contributions positively only because they were written by a particular author. Passig has Nishimura's quote close with: "All information is equal, and only precise arguments will help you."
The servers for 2channel are in America. This means that there are no Japanese providers , making it difficult for Japanese government agencies or courts to access the system.
There are a large number of volunteers who delete unwanted contributions to discussions according to internal guidelines.
Liability for illegal statements
2channel users are anonymous. Therefore, victims of illegal entries can usually not identify the author of individual contributions. This means that civil law claims of the injured party against the individual author and criminal liability of the author usually fail because of his anonymity. However, there are also cases in which an injured party has at least found out the IP address from the operator of 2channel.
However, liability on the part of the operator is conceivable under Japanese law. There are already various legal proceedings in which injured parties have sued.
A well-known case is a lawsuit brought by Debito Arudou . He is best known as a plaintiff in the process of racial discrimination in the Yunohana Onsen in Otaru, with which he defended himself against a “Japanese only” policy of this establishment. He was accused of making racist statements on 2channel. He defended himself against this with a lawsuit that was successful but still poses problems with foreclosure.
The operator of 2channel, Hiroyuki Nishimura, does not feel obliged to fulfill legally established claims. Asahi Shimbun quotes him as follows: We are actually all living bound by an incomplete set of rules - you don't have to pay if you simply refuse to pay. (“In reality we all live under non-binding rules - you don't have to pay if you simply refuse to pay”).
There are numerous successful injured parties lawsuits, the total value of which already exceeds $ 4 million.
Social impact
In 2004 2channel was the stage for a love story that became famous under the name Densha Otoko .
Next 2channel also influence had the choice for Person of the Year by Time magazine taken. A campaign in 2channel resulted in the server crashing due to excessive voter participation and the candidate in question being excluded from the election.
Sources of income
2channel generates income from advertising. One system for this is not to immediately use links from discussion contributions to an external page, but first to forward them to an intermediate page on which advertising is then placed. The user must then first look at the advertising page before he comes to the page that interests him.
Another source of income is that older discussion contributions are moved to an archive, where they can be accessed for a fee.
Web links
- 5channel website
- 2nn.jp : Portal to 2channel
Individual evidence
- ↑ Lisa Katayama: Meet Hiroyuki Nishimura, the Bad Boy of the Japanese Internet. In: Wired. Condé Nast, May 19, 2008, accessed October 24, 2019 .
- ↑ 【GDPR】 EU 諸国 か ら 「5 ち ゃ ん ね る」 へ の ア ク セ ス が 出来 な く な る 浪人 で も 回避 不可. In: source.2chblog.jp. May 23, 2018. Retrieved June 3, 2018 (Japanese).
- ↑ a b c d Lisa Katayama: " 2-Channel Gives Japan's Famously Quiet People a Mighty Voice ", in: Wired .com , April 2007.
- ↑ Alexa.com , Top in Japan Sites
- ↑ stats.2ch.net ( Memento of the original from May 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Hideki Furukawa: Japan Media Review: Q&A With the Founder of Channel 2 , August 22, 2003.
- ↑ Kathrin Passig: Standard situations of technology criticism , Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-26048-7 , p. 60
- ↑ See the decision of the Tokyo Regional Court of September 17, 2003 .
- ↑ Details in the blog category 2channel on Debito's blog .
- ↑ Tomoya Ishikawa and Mariko Sugiyama: " Criticism mounts against online forum ( Memento of September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )", in: Asahi Shimbun , on January 2, 2013.
