In reply to thread 68213 on meta:

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(This post contains my observations and opinions and does not reflect the official stances of 2ch.net, N.T. Technology or Race Queen, Inc.)

The story is not as black and white as the Redditors are making it seem.

2ch has a few very big problems. In February of last year, long time administrator and previous owner Hiroyuki Nishimura had a dispute with the owner of the domain and split and created his own website at 2ch.sc.

2ch has an antiquated API that works on SHIFT-JIS DAT files that contain text delimited by <>. 2ch.sc works by scraping all the .DAT files which can be used to create a mirror of 2ch.net. Then, 2ch.sc spams 2ch.net with links to .sc claiming it as the legitimate 2ch.

Nishimura's business was in selling user data from 2ch to corporations, including IP addresses and DAT files. This is how he paid for the hosting and became a millionaire. Therefore, it didn't matter to him at all how usable the actual site was, ad revenue was meaningless. 2ch.net itself is a mess, it's confusing even for Japanese users. Threads don't auto update, there are no backlinks, the indexes are almost unusable, and until recently there wasn't even an official search function. So, 2ch has an open DAT API that tons of software supports for reading, and a bbs.cgi POST API that it supports for writing.

One symptom of the open API are so called "Matome" blogs. They are just copypaste blogs from 2ch threads with tons of ads on them that use SEO to achieve higher rankings than 2ch itself in google.co.jp search results, then profit off the content 2ch users produced instead of 2ch which needs the money to keep the servers running and staff employed.

Pic related is a list of 2ch dedicated browsers. Red are supported, blue will stop working.

So, what they are doing now is trying to switch from the literally 15 year old SHIFT-JIS DAT API to a more modern JSON one with application keys and everything. 2ch no longer sells data after Nishimura left and is entirely ad supported. However, 90% of the users are using these DAT API browsers and not seeing advertising.

This is where the problems begin and where I think they are making a serious mistake. Switching the API would not be a big deal, but they are requiring developers to get keys to use it. They are putting restrictions on who gets the keys, including one that is causing the most problems: '''the key must not be in the source code!''' Open source apps are no longer allowed due to this restriction, and as you can see from my list of browsers only ''ONE'' Windows application will still work, which is run by Yamashita. There are rumors that Yamashita sells data, I don't know if they are true or not but many 2ch users do not trust him.

The real bad guys, Nishimura and .sc will ''easily!'' be able to pull keys out of these new applications and use them. This is security by obscurity, plain and simple and I do not see it working. Two scenarios: if the key is offsite on a server, you can just easily use Wireshark and get the key out, or at least see the details of the request. You can reverse engineer the apps and get the keys out that way too. They can't grant new keys in a timely matter thanks to how slow Apple is to approve apps. If even one app is easy to reverse engineer, you've got a key that can read/write from any board! Meanwhile, tons of legitimate 2ch users are going to be locked out because their developers don't have keys. Quite honestly, this could even devolve into another Digg situation, where posting the leaked Sony DRM key got all over the place. I can see that happening with these new 2ch API keys. This also won't affect Matome bloggers, they can just copy/paste the HTML pages.

2ch has some official apps, but none are as popular as the third party apps that show no ads and use the old Nishimura APIs. My recommendations to 2ch were to (1) improve the site design and read.js so people will actually use 2ch via 2ch.net, (2) all the content is from 2ch, there is no reason Matome blogs should be higher! Google hates copypaste blogs, we can fix the problem with SEO and Open Graph tags and (3) add features that the dedicated browsers do not support to make 2ch.net the best way to browse 2ch. This is of course the strategy for 8chan, 8ch.net should always be better than any third party app at browsing 8chan.

The administration is shrugging off the subreddit and the splinter 2ch's but there are large numbers of users who are going to be locked out and forced to either use the official/semi-official apps that have gotten keys or find a new site. I continue to maintain that an open JSON API like 8chan has would have been a much better decision. 

I think that there is no genuine cause for concern in any case, if huge portions of 2ch users are ignored, traffic will crash and they'll put the DATs back and probably start to see it my way.

Sorry for the long blog post but that's basically the rundown.
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