2ch
From Academic Kids
- This article is about the Japanese forum. See 2CH for the Sydney radio station.
2ch.png
2channel (2ちゃんねる, pronounced "nee-channel", 2ch for short) is the largest Internet forum in the world.1 With over 10 million visitors every day (as of 2001), it is gaining significant influence in Japanese society, approaching that of traditional mass media such as TV, radio and magazines.
Overview
2ch was opened in 1999 by Hiroyuki Nishimura, known simply as "Hiroyuki" (ひろゆき). Today, most moderation on the forum is done by a voluntary group, self-elected and picked from 2ch users. 2ch itself is non-commercial and run by banner advertisement fees and support from a hosting service company that provides specially priced inexpensive UNIX hosting.
What is unique about this forum is its scale and its management style. It has more than 600 "board groups" (Japanese ita) each with its own categorical topic (ex. "Social News", "Computer", "Cooking"). Each "ita" usually has hundreds of "threads", which are actual discussion pages created by users for each detailed topic (ex. "Coming election in Tokyo-- 4th vote", "P4 vs. Athlon-- overheating 51 times", "Best wheat for making Pizza-- 3rd slice").
2ch operates on innovative forum software which is a major departure from 1980s bulletin board systems or 1990s forums software such as vBulletin. Most importantly, nearly everything is done anonymously, and voluntarily. A posting in a thread will either "age" (bump) or "sage" (down) its position in the thread list; "saged" posts have no effect on its postition. Threads may be "saged" if the thread is disliked, or to keep it from cluttering the main thread list, or to prevent idle browsers from flooding in and trolling the thread at the top of the list.
Each thread is limited to 1000 postings at maximum, and must be created again (by some anonymous user, self-elected during discussion) to continue discussion. This prevents the rottening of old threads and keeps active topics refreshed. It also saves bandwidth, which is a major concern on a forum as large as 2ch. Old threads are moved to a paid archive, then eventually deleted.
With the huge popularity of this forum, the style of web forums with anonymity, index, and sage features is now known as "2ch-style".
Anonymous posting
One of the most distinguishing features of 2ch is the complete freedom of anonymous posting. This is a great departure from American internet forums which require some form of registration, usually coupled with email verification for further identification of an individual. On 2ch, a name field is available but seldom used. Entering your name in the field either identifies you as a newbie who doesn't understand the forum, or an administrator, or someone attempting to be a Web celebrity.
From an interview (http://www.ojr.org/japan/internet/1061505583.php) with the founder in the Japan Media Review:
- Q: Why did you decide to use perfect anonymity, not even requiring a user name?
- A: Because delivering news without taking any risk is very important to us. There is a lot of information disclosure or secret news gathered on Channel 2. Few people would post that kind of information by taking a risk. Moreover, people can only truly discuss something when they don't know each other.
- If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/information is criticized, you don't know with whom to be upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree with them. Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, "it's boring," if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work.
Culture
2ch-aa.png
Several important and/or well-known social issues (incidents, social movements, etc) are known to have relation with this forum, and due to early shocking events (see Neomugicha incident) for an example), this forum is somewhat acknowledged as "underground-ish" despite its wide acceptance, especially in the younger generations. On the other hand, these incidents helped 2ch to have huge publicity through mass-media coverings.
2ch members participate in various distributed computing projects such as the United Devices Cancer Research Project and SETI@home. 2ch is the current leader of the UD project, with the highest results and point total, as well as having the largest number of participants.
Frequent visitors of 2ch are usually called (and call themselves) "2ちゃんねらー" (meaning "2ch'er", pronouced "ni-chan-ne-rah", romaji is "ni channerā). Even though topics vary a lot between each thread/ita, 2ch as a whole keeps its unity through its unique cultural backplane. "2ch slang", "2ch AA" (Shift_JIS encoded ASCII art) and "2ch Flash" are examples of such culture. Many virtual characters, such as Mona, and Onigiri have evolved out from these creations, and are now acknowledged as mascots representing the whole community. The now famous Soy Sauce Warrior Kikkoman parody character was created by members of the 2ch forums, as well as its flash movies.
Trolling and off-topic posting on 2ch is tolerated and has become a common feature of its culture. In this way it is similar to early Slashdot, where trolls were commonplace, or the modern Something Awful Forums, where bad threads are quickly derailed or "saved" by either a ban or closing the thread & making it invisible to regular users (beecocked (http://forums.somethingawful.com/dictionary.php?act=3&topicid=340)). However, 2channel does not tolerate spamming and flooding.
Due to its chaotic nature and large size, it is difficult to describe or define this emerging community. Several movements to self-describe it have been running, and so the reader is recommended to visit these materials. For that matter, similarities with Usenet are many.
Terminology
These terms are used both on 2channel and on its Japanese and American spinoffs.
- AA - Abbreviation of "ASCII art", usually referring to common Shift-JIS art characters.
- Aborn (Jp. あぼーん (abōn) ) - "To delete a post". Posts are deleted in two ways: Normal Aborn and invisible Aborn (Japanese 透明あぼーん). Any posts deleted as normal Abon are replaced by a special post, whose subject, date, and body are all "あぼーん".
- Age (pronounced "ah-geh") - From Japanese ageru (上げる "to raise"), refers to replying to an especially noteworthy or neglected post in order to move it to the top of the topic list (equivalent to the English bump)
- Capcode - A special, custom tripcode used by website administrators and especially famous people chosen by the webmasters; in Japanese, simply "cap".
- Fixed Handle - An online nickname (as opposed to anonymity); in Japanese, Kotehan, from Kotei Handle Name
- Mona - An ASCII art character
- Giko Cat (Giko neko) - Another ASCII art character
- Off Kai - An offline meeting by anonymous posters
- Sage (pronounced "sah-geh") - from Japanese sageru (下げる "to lower"), refers to replying to a post using the word "sage" in the email field in order to increase the number of replies without age-ing the post. This can be used as a courtesy, allowing one to quietly add comments that may not be interesting enough to warrant pushing the thread to the top. It can also be used as a way to show displeasure with the post being replied to.
- Tripcode - A cryptographic hash created from a password, used to allow a user to "sign" their posts while remaining anonymous; in Japanese, simply "trip"
- ">>" - Often followed with the numeral of the intended post to mean reply or follow up. 2ch automatically makes a link.
- >>1-san (>>1さん) - An ASCII art character, representing the poster who started the thread it appears in.
Common abbreviations and phrases
- Burakura (ブラクラ) - "Browser crusher", one who posts links to sites designed to crash users' web browsers.
- Chu or Chubou (厨 or 厨房) - An intentional misuse of kanji for "中坊" (a middle school kid), it refers to those posters who post without reading any rules, also to those who engage in flaming and spamming.
- Natsuchu (夏厨) - Someone who appears in the summer break and makes ridiculous posts, acting like Chu
- Fuun (（ ´_ゝ`）ﾌｰﾝ ) - a kaomoji for indifference; the word 「フーン」 is the Japanese equivalent of the English "hunh." The fuun face is the basis of the Sasuga Brothers AA.
- Fuyuchu (冬厨) - Same as natsuchu, but for posters appearing in winter.
- Haahaa ((*´Д`)ﾊｧﾊｧ) - a kaomoji basically meaning one is either masturbating or showing horniness. The katakana 「ハァハァ」 is onomatopoeia for heavy breathing.
- Kami (神 or ネ申) - Someone who gives out valuable information very fast; see Kami
- Kita!! (ｷﾀ━━━━━━(ﾟ∀ﾟ)━━━━━━ !!!!!) - Literally, "I/It came!", it is generally used as a big exclamation mark. The face in the center is named jisakujien.
- Kopipe (コピペ) - Copy/paste. A text passage or piece of AA that is frequently recycled and reposted.
- Nullpo (ヌルポ) - A parody of the Java output "NullPointerException". Usually followed up with "GA(ガッ)!", the sound of a hammer hitting the "nullpo" poster, because of a meme started in this thread (http://pc.2ch.net/prog/kako/1024/10245/1024553352.html).
- Uhho! (ウホッ) - Originally from a gay manga, used somewhat like Haahaa and Kita!! but when the post is macho
- ｗ - A single letter substituting for "warai" or "laughing", added to mean that the poster is joking or thinks he made a funny remark, basically the equivalent to "LOL"; putting "ｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗｗ" at the end of something is the same thing as saying "LOLOLOLOLOLOL". Also warota (ワロタ) from the Kansai-ben past tense of warau. Warosu (ワロス) is one of the recent derivatives of warota, from the threads (http://that3.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/gline/1113202246/) (ワロス のガイドライン, Guidelines for warosu), where endless word-chanting of warosues is going on.
English Offsprings
There have been some attempts by various internet communities to form their own, more English or internationally-oriented message boards in the style and tradition of 2ch. The first and most notable has been the now defunct world2ch, administered by Taichirou Kosugi ("RIR7") and abandoned in late 2003.
4-ch (http://4-ch.net), historically following world2ch, is an English website with discussion boards for English speakers and also contains a board where Japanese 2ch users can talk in Japanese.
4chan, an English website based around Japanese content, now also has anonymous message boards similar to 2ch: world4ch (http://www.world4ch.org).
See also
External links
- 2ch.net - The 2ch site (in Japanese)
- 2-Ten (http://www.media-k.co.jp/jiten/) ("ni-ten") - 2ch reference (also available as a book from Amazon.jp (http://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/4835440331/250-6639415-0827444))
- English list and navigation of 2ch boards (http://4-ch.net/2chportal/) at 4-ch.net
Special characters
Footnotes
Note 1: At stats.2ch.net (http://stats.2ch.net/suzume.cgi?yes) you can view the number of posts made every day. Currently there are 2 million posts made every day. This is 20 times larger than the biggest Internet forum on big-boards.com (http://www.big-boards.com).ja:2ちゃんねる lt:2ch zh:2ch
