In 06/09/1998, unknown coder, Amezou-shi (Mr Amezou) opened the first Japanese floating threat BBS and called it "Amezou". Mr Amezou is a nickname and his real identity is still unknown to this day. What is known in Japan as Nanashi Warudo and it's English offspring like 4chan are direct offspring of Amezou. Floating message system introduced a system where more popular thread was "bump"ed (ageru) and unpopular thread get eliminated eventually. This has made it easier to find popular threads as well as reducing the server load of the site. Since use of BBS was still limited to techies, much of discussion centred around underground IT topics such as Warez. However as the popularity of Amezou increase, the site come to suffer increasingly from shut down as well as antonymous vandalism, which made many threads unreadable. Several posting of violent threat against Mr Amezou caused eventual shut down of Amezou. Before the site was shut down, Mr Amezou made a plea to the community to create alternative site similar to Amezou. The community responded and many refuge sites was created using the same program.
One of these message board was called "2 Channel" created by Hiroyuki (Hiroyuki Nishimura). Hiroyuki named his site 2Channel as the second channel of the first, i.e. Amezou. He recruited seasoned participants as Administrators to watch out for vandalism in each board, but aside from that, the thread remained essentially unmoderated and any kind of speech was permitted. One of the main innovation of Hiroyuki was to expand general interest section of message board. Previously, most of message board thread was dominated by tech topics, with only one board assigned to "General/Off topic". Hiroyuki instead created various board for non tech topic such as discussion board for current affairs. Due to unmoderated nature of the site, 2Chanel became free-for-all, no-holds-barred discussion boards for general topic.
Laurent Jacobs on 04 Dec 08I'm curious. With all your research and experiments, what do you think about that?
