
Hiroyuki Nishimura, founder of 2channel, has taken ownership of 4chan - gerjomarty
https://www.4chan.org/news
======
arpstick
Hiroyuki Nishimura the previous administrator of 2ch.net sold the user data of
2channel users and he was fired by Jim, who happens to be the host of 8ch.net.

Sweet sweet irony.

~~~
ijktdot
2ch also offered a paid post deletion service used by political parties when
Nishimura was running it, after the 2ch coup he scraped the site and started
2ch.sc

This is the guy who runs 2ch/8ch
[https://twitter.com/xerxeswatkins](https://twitter.com/xerxeswatkins)

~~~
pervycreeper
Puts this quote in a new light:

>He is one of few individuals with a deep understanding of what it means to
provide a digital home for tens of millions of people for more than a decade.
There is nobody more qualified than Hiroyuki to lead 4chan, and I can't think
of a person better suited for the task.

~~~
arpstick
The Japanese government payed him to take down politically sensitive posts on
2channel[1]. He's probably the worst person to put in charge of a community
according those who were subjected to him in the past.

[1] [http://www.anonymous-japan.org/fake2ch/](http://www.anonymous-
japan.org/fake2ch/)

~~~
talmand
Seems to me a number of the highly visited communities are going down this
path.

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shubhamjain
A few days ago, an article was posted how WhatsApp has scaled to nearly a
billion users and is still running with only 50 engineers. Isn't running 4chan
more impressive feat being run, if I am not wrong, by just one engineer, and
that too from a time when web development tools weren't anywhere close to what
we have today.

~~~
ijktdot
Most of the chans (2ch/8ch/4chan/420chan ect) are just FreeBSD boxes and
cgi/perl scripts

[http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/interviews/moot-4chan.h...](http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/interviews/moot-4chan.html)

~~~
bydo
2ch has been, for over a decade, one of (if not always the absolute) largest
discussion forums in Japan. No matter what the base system is, there's some
serious infrastructure there.

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Jasper_
It's weird, because 2channel recently had a big user exodus. A lot of users
used desktop clients. Those were banned in a push to monetize. As a result, a
lot of 2ch users started lots of 2ch replacement subreddits, the largest being
newsokur:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/newsokur](https://www.reddit.com/r/newsokur)

~~~
ijktdot
The exodus was from the Kenmou board who refused affiliate marketing on their
board they claimed was data mining their IPs. The desktop clients weren't
banned, just really old browsers they were using were no longer supported due
to new methods of embedding ads. A lot of them used legacy browsers like this
one which is no longer in development
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazehakase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazehakase)

------
r721
The New York Times story: [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/4chan-
sells-to-japa...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/4chan-sells-to-
japanese-web-culture-pioneer-2channel/)

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userbinator
Note that 2channel's URL is not 2chan.net, but 2ch.net, and it's a text-only
site. It is more commonly known as "2ch". It's interesting to see that both
2ch/2chan have not really changed since they were created, whereas 4chan went
through quite a bit of "modernising". I wonder if 4chan might start turning
back to a 2ch/2chan-ish style with this.

~~~
rogeryu
> I wonder if 4chan might start turning back to a 2ch/2chan-ish style with
> this.

Do you think they will change all images to ASCII art as well?

~~~
fluxquanta
ｷﾀ━━━━━━(ﾟ∀ﾟ)━━━━━━ !!!!!

------
Joona
Permanent (?) link:
[https://www.4chan.org/news?all#120](https://www.4chan.org/news?all#120)

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Syrup-tan
Can we get /prog/ back? <3

~~~
merlincorey
If only The Sussman were still alive, we might have a chance to reach satori.

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amyjess
Well, that's an interesting development. I didn't see it coming, but in
hindsight, Nishimura is perfect.

I thought moot already signed over ownership to a board of people though... I
guess it was just the management he handed over.

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austenallred
I feel bad for moot. He'll probably be known for the rest of his life for
creating a cesspool he never made much money from.

~~~
brador
> he never made much money from

You believe that? Dude banked on both the sale and takeover, plus the ad
revenue when he was running the site.

He had no alternative but to push the poverty myth (Kevin Rose@Digg also did
this). Can you imagine what the users would do if he disclosed how much he was
raking in?

My guess? $10 million n/w post sale, most likely much more.

~~~
Karunamon
What ad revenue? 4chan has always had a huge problem attracting advertisers
due to the _ahem_ nature of its content.

I could imagine that he made some serious bank on the sale, but the site has
always has run at a net loss.

~~~
brador
> 4chan has always had a huge problem attracting advertisers due to the ahem
> nature of its content

According to who?

Remember how cheap the site is to run.

It's like the Pirate Bay guys saying they made no money. Those ads paid big
and they raked.

~~~
Karunamon
According to the guy who ran the site. If you think he's lying about that,
please put forth some evidence.

~~~
brador
> According to the guy who ran the site.

Do you see the problem?

~~~
Karunamon
Okay, so considering that 4chan didn't accept donations, didn't have any form
of user-generated revenue until the (very recent) 4chan pass thing, Poole has
_always_ maintained that the site was a money loser.

Also, cheap to run? The bandwidth costs _alone_ would be HUGE.

Not sure why you think he has a motive to lie about this - and if he does,
again, put forth some evidence rather than spurious accusations. Calling the
guy a liar with no proof to the contrary is just so much cheap sniping.

~~~
brador
You conveniently missed ad revenue. 4chan has around 650m pageviews a month.
At $0.25/1000 that's a few million a year.

And I didn't say he was lying, I said I don't believe him.

~~~
nemothekid
4Chan's self serve ads are priced at a quarter of that, ~.25c CPM currently,
and the inventory is never completely sold.

------
theworstshill
sadfrog.jpg

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chubalub
All hail chinese moot!

