Japanese AskMe-style site launched

February 24, 2005 6:10 AM

AskMe(-like) massive rollout in Japan. [mi]
posted by Bugbread to MetaFilter-Related at 6:10 AM (23 comments total)

Not that there's much to discuss, unless you can read Japanese, but I thought some folks would be interested to know that Goo.ne.jp (think Yahoo or MSN in terms of scale and content) has just recently rolled out oshiete.goo.ne.jp (teachme.goo.je.jp), which is a free website / section of goo.ne.jp where users can post questions and other users who know the answers can post answers. It has the bells and whistles you'd expect of a big Yahoo-like service (free, nice formatting, pretty good search, since they're a search engine (though they're no Google), a point system and ranking system for good answerers, a dynamic list of frequently viewed questions, ad nauseum). They've put up quite a bit of advertising (lots of posters in train stations). We'll see how successful it turns out. Just your random Mefilike trivia for the day.
posted by Bugbread at 6:11 AM on February 24, 2005

Honestly, it's not the "ask a question, get some answers" part of AskMe that's so great. It's the users. Mefites are (vastly?) more intelligent, inquisitive and technical than the general populous, and have an extremely wide variety of interests. And that's why AskMe succeeds where other such fora fall flat.
posted by Plutor at 6:58 AM on February 24, 2005

Agreed, and secretly I'm looking forward to the impending oshiete.goo implosion of bad answers and trolls, but admitting that is like admitting you're looking forward to seeing a car crash, so pretend I didn't say it.
posted by Bugbread at 7:07 AM on February 24, 2005

Mefites are (vastly?) more intelligent, inquisitive and technical than the general populous, and have an extremely wide variety of interests.

Some of us even know the difference between "populous" and "populace."
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 8:11 AM on February 24, 2005

Well, he said "more intelligent," not that he was a genious ;)
posted by scarabic at 8:54 AM on February 24, 2005

Mefites are (vastly?) more intelligent, inquisitive and technical than the general populous, and have an extremely wide variety of interests.

Do you look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself this nightly?
posted by xmutex at 9:01 AM on February 24, 2005

Do you look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself this nightly?

I'm going to guess "no".
posted by Bugbread at 9:21 AM on February 24, 2005

Some of us even know the difference between "populous" and "populace."

I knew I was gonna fuck up that comment. Sigh. Let's say I was talking about the average Mefite, and my own idiocy and spelling problems merely pull this average down slightly.

That doesn't mean I'm wrong, though. AskMe comes up with such improbable answers in such a small amount of time. That can't be normal.
posted by Plutor at 9:34 AM on February 24, 2005

sou desu ka
posted by driveler at 9:47 AM on February 24, 2005

AskMe comes up with such improbable answers in such a small amount of time. That can't be normal.

Come one, come all, have your childhood remembrances identified while you wait!

I kid, I kid. AskMe is a friend of mine. We go way back.
posted by ludwig_van at 9:56 AM on February 24, 2005

Plutor: While I do agree that we may be more intelligent and technical than the general populace, I disagree about being more or less inquisitive or having wider or narrower interests. With a large enough group, you'd be surprised how many improbable answers (and questions) are produced.

However, the larger the group, the lower the signal to noise ratio. Too few people, and you can't get answers. Too many, and you can't trust answers. I suspect oshiete will rapidly veer into the "can't trust" area.
posted by Bugbread at 9:57 AM on February 24, 2005

AskMe is astonishingly good and a wide range of things, but niche forums are frequently better for very specific purposes. You just have to know where to look.
posted by scarabic at 11:17 AM on February 24, 2005

Well, japanese people are very even tempered. So perhaps they will not face the problem we have in the west with rampant trolling. I wonder if there are many japanese spammers?
posted by delmoi at 11:18 AM on February 24, 2005

Delmoi: Spammers, no, but Japan has a troll problem like nowhere I have EVER seen before, and I used to read Usenet. When I say "trolls", I mean it in the old sense which is no longer in vogue: intentionally saying something inflammatory or wrong, which you don't even believe, just to piss people off. Huge sections of 2ch.net (Japan's biggest messageboard. No equivalent in the English speaking net) are pretty much unreadable due to the trolling, countertrolling, and countercountertrolling. And just plain rudeness (lots of comments to the effect of "fuck off and die", etc)

Admittedly, it's not indicative of all segments of Japanese society (I can't imagine many troll housewives with little kids), but it is indicative of a large group of internet users with both the time and the inclination to troll madly, who are going to go ape on goo.
posted by Bugbread at 11:39 AM on February 24, 2005

Japanese people are even tempered? You've obviously never dated a Japanese girl, seen "Tetsuo: The Iron Man", Bukakke porn, or heard about used-panty vending machines, fugu, otaku, or any of the other extra extremely extreme things the Japanese like to - obsessively - do in their free time.

Sweet flash-frozen c'thulhu popsicles! We're talking about a segment of humanity that puts squid and squid ink on pizza! A nation that has RealDoll brothels where you rent thoroughly used, lifeless silicon humping dolls!
posted by loquacious at 12:03 PM on February 24, 2005

Could be worse, Japan could be a nation that eat's bull's balls, makes the Ass Clown series of gonzo porn, smoke crack and kill eachother, shoot up schools, or suck the brains out of garbage-dwelling crayfish.

Just kidding, but if you think the very indie and unknown Tetsuo, bukkake porn, panty vending machines, or RealDoll brothels are at all indicative of Japan, you don't know Japan too well. Fugu, ok, you've got a point. Otaku are just as bad or worse in America, so we'll call that a draw. Squid and squid ink is neither here nor there (personally, I don't see what's wrong with either, and am amused by the occasional Americans I meet who recoil at the word "squid" but rave on about how good "calamari" are).
posted by Bugbread at 12:36 PM on February 24, 2005

Yeah, I reacted a little strongly, and picked some easy targets. And I wasn't even remotely suggesting that the US is even tempered. God no. But still, Japan is damn weird and full of extremes. I think it was some Daniel Quinn I read somewhere that said, paraphrased "It's not like when you're in The East you've just walked into some huge, serene, zenlike Buddhist temple" or that things are somehow better or more peaceful or anything simply by being in Asia.

I don't have any problem with squid, but it's the juxtaposition of Italian pizza pie and an arguably bizarre sea creature that I find interesting. We're also talking about Zaibatsu, Yakuza and those insanely custom modified freight and service trucks buried under cascading wedding cakes of chrome, airbrushing and lights. Bike gangs. Gothic Lolita. Earthquakes. Monthly rent for mere closet space in excess of what most in the world would pay for a simple car. Extremely dense technologies and infrastructure. I don't say any of these things derisively; Japan doesn't need any protection from me. But even tempered is not a phrase I would use to describe it.
posted by loquacious at 2:24 PM on February 24, 2005

"However, the larger the group, the lower the signal to noise ratio. Too few people, and you can't get answers. Too many, and you can't trust answers. I suspect oshiete will rapidly veer into the "can't trust" area."

Wiki seems to do pretty well though?
posted by triv at 2:25 PM on February 24, 2005

it's the juxtaposition of Italian pizza pie and an arguably bizarre sea creature that I find interesting.

You're talking about anchovies, right?
posted by ZippityBuddha at 2:39 PM on February 24, 2005

I don't see that most of the stuff you're pointing out has much to do with temperament, though, in regards to trolls/etc. Conversely, look at America, if you will, from another perspective: Relatively bland music scene, relatively bland (but expensive!) cinema, relatively bland taste in cars, etc., but you wouldn't argue that people tend to be mild-mannered and polite, would you? The temperament of people and their tastes in pop culture don't necessarily go hand in hand (somehow, I imagine more Brittney Spears fans getting in fistfights than Aphex Twin fans, even though Aphex is weirder).

So, I agree with your conclusion (Japanese are not necessarily so mild tempered), but not the examples you use for support.

Other random stuff (since you seem to know your Japan relatively well, but don't seem to know the up-to-date stuff as much): Yakuza are still around aplenty. No change there. Zaibatsu: well, they're different, but I don't see them being too weird. No weirder than Time/Warner or Coca Cola or the other megaconglomerates.

The biker gangs have really died down now. They still exist, but they aren't any more extreme or bizarre than your general 21st century American street gangs. You probably know them more for their 80's and 90's bizarre bike mods. I miss those days.

The deco-trucks are still going strong.

Gothic Lolita is big, but, from what I gather, it's really catching on overseas as well, so that may soon be one of those things that started in Japan but everyone forgot the origins of, like crystal meth or techno music.

Earthquakes? I used to live in LA. We had earthquakes.

Expensive rent? New York costs more (yeah, I was surprised too).

Good tech, yeah, we've got. Weird gaps, though, with a few products.

And from what I gather, there's calamari pizza in Italy. Maybe not with tinta (squid ink), though. And I don't see what makes pizza so normal and squid so odd, unless you think Italy is a wacky zany place too.

Triv: Wiki seems to do pretty well though?

True. The difference (but, well pointed out, not really addressed by my argument) is that goo and wikipedia are aimed at two very different groups of people. It would be more useful to imagine if AOL, MSN, or Yahoo tried this.
posted by Bugbread at 2:42 PM on February 24, 2005

The thing about Japan is this : tatemae and honne. They just hide their chaos under more layers than us westerners.
posted by FieldingGoodney at 3:00 PM on February 24, 2005

True.

And, since this is getting increasingly off-topic (that said, I didn't expect any discussion on the topic anyway, I posted it as more tangentially Mefi related "informational" than "discussional" anyway), I think the big problem here is 2ch.net.

2ch.net is a giant, giant, giant forum/messageboard. Think of mefi, newrepublic, livejournal, slashdot, penny arcade, fark, livejournal, and any other random discussion board you've ever visited, rolled into one. I don't know the background of the site, but it's completely anonymous (er, well, not to the owner, I'm sure, but to all posters). You don't have a handle, you don't have any means of identifying who wrote a post. A discussion could consist of 20 people, or 2 people, or one person playing multiple parts, and you wouldn't know. There's absolutely no moderation. Nothing is deleted. Someone posted something about DHC (a skin product company) putting some kind of bad chemicals in their products, and they requested the owner of the site delete it. He refused, they sued, he lost, and he now owes something like a million dollars to them. To avoid paying them, he has quit his job, and has the legal basis that with no income, he has no means with which to pay. I believe everything he owns is in other peoples' names, and whatever he income he makes from whatever he does (as well as hosting fees) is paid by who-knows-what kinds of off-the-books money.

2ch.net is and has been the dominant shaper of the Japanese non-corporate net, and people have "grown up" on the internet in such an environment. And total anonymity brings some really good flash animations, some funny threads, and an amazing amount of trolls, attacks, etc. Trolls feed eachother and breed minitrolls, and now you've got an amazingly large amount of trolls and folks who don't always troll, but enjoy occasional trolling, or at least being incredibly abrasive.

Imagine, for example, a typical comment in a Playstation thread by a Nintendo user in English: "You Pussystation players are all big fucking homos. Go fuck yourselves." The 2ch.net version would probably be "Die. Fucking die."

So while honne and tatemae may be big, and repressed anger, and other factors, I think the biggest factor in Japanese netiquette would be this poisonous environment people have been raised in.

oshiete.goo.ne.jp will have non-anonymous accounts (er, well, anonymous to the degree that people use handles, not real names, but non-anonymous to the extent that you can see and track the handle of any user, kinda like mefi). Maybe that will be enough to curb problems. But I'd hate to see the size of the moderator staff goo has hired to keep the place clean.

Actually, I take that back, I'd love to see the size of that group.
posted by Bugbread at 3:40 PM on February 24, 2005

I'm fascinated by oshiete. They do have the "Please tell me the name of this X that I remember from long ago and can't identify" questions--and lots of them are getting answered correctly. I'm not familiar with 2ch.net--fortunately. I do hope that the trolling won't get out of hand, 'cause for now it seems like a really nice site, if without the personal community feeling of AskMeFi.
posted by Jeanne at 8:05 PM on February 24, 2005