1ch.tv

» see 1ch.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 4 October 2001 Kazuhiko Nishi held a press conference. Nishi was a special adviser at ASCII and one of the better-known figures in Japanese computing, and what he said was that he had looked at 2channel and could not accept that a board that rude and that broken was allowed to exist. 2channel's users had a reply ready: then do it yourself. The site opened the next day. Its name said that あめぞう, the board 2channel had grown out of, came first.

The company behind it was Value Exchange, whose president Koji Shimizu was the registered owner; Nishi took the editor's title and took part as an individual rather than on ASCII's behalf. あめぞう supplied the board software and E-Store supplied the system and the commerce side. The plan was 60 boards of 400 threads each. Six months in, it was supposed to be drawing 400,000 visitors a day.

None of that happened. What did happen was a small site, mostly concerned with one other site, that lasted until 2010 and stopped without anybody saying so.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ a board with an editor ~

Identity was never the lever here. Posting anonymously was fine, and so was a pen name or a real one. What the system was supposed to prevent was 自作自演, one person running two handles and arguing with himself in public. Registration was free, and every board had an 編集長, an editor-in-chief with the power to delete.

Revenue was meant to come out of reading. Authors could price a post at roughly five to ten yen per access, and about half the sixty boards were earmarked to go paid from February 2002, on prepaid cards. ASCII's own write-up of the launch noted the obvious hole in the first half of this: buy twenty prepaid cards and you are twenty people again.

~ 211 hours ~

The site went live with its CGI turned off. For 211 hours after launch, by the Japanese-language account of those first days, the anti-2channel bulletin board could be browsed and not posted to, and the name 2channel gave it was a read-only bulletin board. That is most of nine days, at the opening of a project sold entirely on being run better than the thing it was attacking.

~ what the server gave away ~

On 5 December 2001 a configuration mistake exposed the internals. Posters' IP addresses came out, and so did the administrator passwords and the scripts behind them. What traveled furthest was the staff's own conversation, in which あめぞう asked the others whether anybody had a good rumor they could get going on 2channel, so that 1ch would take off and 2channel would close.

Three weeks earlier an internal attempt to take over the running of the site had already failed. One of the board managers, a twenty-year-old who would later be known as Kensuu, resigned over it and wrote years afterwards that what remained was a strange place where only people who hated 2channel gathered.

~ the eight quiet years ~

Most retellings of this stop in 2001, with the leak. The site itself kept serving for another eight years. Its address moved to amezo.jp in June 2005, though 1ch.tv itself was still answering as late as July 2008. There are posts on the boards dated February 2009. The last page anybody can load is a frameset captured on 5 March 2010. After that the menu comes up empty and the host stops answering, and no closure notice has ever been found. Japanese Wikipedia dates the end to May 2010 and says, in its own words, that it appears to have closed.

A site whose whole identity is being not-that-other-site is only readable by people who already argue about the other site. That argument never crossed a language barrier, and 1ch.tv was built inside it rather than beside it, so from outside Japan there was never anything there to be a reader of. The domain today redirects to a survey farm. For a site that put .tv in its name and never once carried video, that is close to appropriate.

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