Yahoo! Japan Bulletin Board

» see textream.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Yahoo! Bulletin Board opened in July 1998, ten months before 2channel existed, and for the next two decades it was one of the two places the Japanese web went to argue in public. It ran on a tree structure rather than the flat thread that 2channel made famous, so replies nested under replies and a long argument looked like a diagram. Posting required a Yahoo! JAPAN ID. You picked a handle and that handle followed you.

That single design decision separated it from everything else in Japanese forum culture. 2channel let anyone post as 名無しさん with no account at all, and its whole character came from that. Yahoo's board asked for registration first, which made it slower and considerably less fun, and also made it the place where a lot of ordinary people who were not going to touch 2channel went to argue about baseball or a company's earnings. The finance boards in particular became load-bearing for Japanese retail investors, which is a fact that matters later.

Yahoo replaced it with textream, which launched on 21 December 2012 as the renewal, carrying nicknames and post voting, and the original Yahoo!掲示板 was closed on 26 March 2013. The old boards did not migrate their culture across. Six years later Yahoo announced that textream was ending too, and on 28 January 2019 the stock and foreign-exchange categories were transferred into Yahoo! Finance while every other category was closed. Twenty years of one of the Japanese web's two big forums came down to a finance vertical keeping the useful bit.

~ the record ~

~ the id requirement ~

Requiring an account was a moderation strategy before anyone called it that. It gave Yahoo a lever that 2channel did not have, and it gave posters an identity they had to keep, which changes what people are willing to type. The tradeoff is that the board never developed the anonymous folk culture that produced everything from ASCII art to entire memes in the Japanese internet of the 2000s. Yahoo got a manageable forum. 2channel got the language.

~ the boards that made money ~

The stock boards were the exception to every generalization about the site. Japanese retail investors used the per-ticker boards as a live feed of rumor and abuse around individual companies, and they were busy in a way the rest of the board was not by the 2010s. That is why the shutdown notice reads the way it does: the stock and currency categories were moved into Yahoo! Finance, where they still run today. Everything without a ticker symbol attached to it was deleted.

~ from the other side of the continent ~

My forum years ran on the same calendar and none of them were here. Turkish message boards in the 2000s meant donanimhaber and frmtr, and the signature block listing your hardware was the local equivalent of a profile page. Same shape of thing in the same years, on a completely separate internet. Japan's forum history is one of the few big regional web cultures that produced its own vocabulary and exported almost none of it, and reading about Yahoo!掲示板 now is mostly reading about a country's argument style rather than a product.

~ what remains ~

Yahoo! Finance's board section still carries the 旧textream label in places, which is the closest thing to a headstone the service got. There was no archive release and no export tool. The threads that were not about equities simply stopped resolving on 28 January 2019.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »