So who is the “previous management” Watkins declared incapable? Some suspect a coup by Watkins against Nishimura. But this is just speculation. Around the time the site was down, Nishimura tweeted in Japanese, “Things quietly end; time has passed like this.” Assuming this tweet was even related to the takeover, it has been Nishimura’s only public action.
There is another theory that Watkins is referring to one or a few individuals at operator level. Last year the site suffered a massive leak in privacy information of its paid users. The leak included credit-card security codes, which are not supposed to be stored on the seller’s side. This incident impacted 2channel’s income, which was used to pay N.T. Technology. Watkins may be positioning himself as the lead to fix the situation.
No one wants to claim ownership of 2channel and take responsibility for lawsuits and tax issues, but for the time being, Watkins implies that he has taken over the site’s management, whether that means he is just Nishimura’s minion or aiming to be the new emperor.
Watkins set up a thread named “Let’s talk with Jim-san in operate” on 2channel to exchange ideas on what he should do to keep the site running. As Watkins does not speak Japanese, the discussions are being carried out in a mix of English and Japanese, with a lot of machine translations.
One big discussion earlier this month was about the comments-reuse policy by third parties. Matome (summary) sites select quality comments from 2channel threads to republish and generate advertising revenue, with top sites reportedly getting 100 million monthly page views. These sites siphon users away from 2channel itself, affecting the number of posts made there.
Many board users told Watkins they want tensai kinshi, which means to explicitly prohibit third parties from reusing their comments. Watkins approved this, and the policy of many popular boards were changed to reflect this from March 2.
Summary sites panicked. Since their content was taken entirely from 2channel boards, some were forced to shut down, or to cease updates, take comments from Twitter instead, and so on. Some guided their readers to other 2channel-style clone sites that have no such restrictions, such as Open-2channel. One of Japan’s largest websites, FC2, opened boards with the same name as those affected on 2channel in a bid to lure users.
However, it turned out that Watkins had misunderstand the phrase tensai kinshi to which he had agreed. He had just wanted to add “all rights reserved” as preventive warning, but got “tensai kinshi” when he tried to translate the phrase using Google Translate and made it an option for users to vote for. Once he realized his mistake, Watkins backtracked all changes on March 5, and summary sites have resumed business as usual.
This incident proves how difficult it will be to manage such a massive forum without knowing the language. If Watkins really has taken over the site, he needs to find Japanese-speaking staff. And if he has in fact been ordered by Nishimura to set foot on the minefield simply because no one else wants to be considered as a honcho in the eyes of the authorities, confusion will continue.