I wasn't there when World2ch happened, lived and came down, so it's kind of a legendary place to me. I'd like some people who had something do wo with the site, had contributed to it or just lurked there to contribute their knowledge and stories here, to educate us about this mythos.
The era of world2ch was a magical time. It was like the Wild West, virgin territory to be raped and pillaged by those who colonized it. Both Japanese and Westerners held hands, danced naked under the stars, and shared the love that is flaming the fuck out of every goddamned shitty thread that ever existed. It was kinda like Woodstock, but without the venereal diseases.
Epic threads and posters came out of that time. YARANAIKA, get out of my internet, and Apology Juice was first introduced to the West here. Epic threads like "I want to be a girl like Sakura-tan", "Yoshinoya", and the Great Golgolmois thread was birthed. Shitty gimmicks like Caveman came about (and gave birth to the proto-/b/tard).
Unfortunately, 4chan came about and sucked all the Western posters away. RIR6 (world2ch's moot) did a shitty job upkeeping the server. And without Westerners to flame and antagonize, world2ch's Japanese population went back to 2ch.
That's the story, in a nutshell.
Don't forget Miko Miko Nurse! World2ch brought Miko Miko Nurse to the West!
By the way, you didn't get the story of its end correct. 4chan didn't suck anyone away. RIR6 implemented new "features" that actually screwed up the boards and made it hard to post, and then one day he implemented a "feature" that broke CGI entirely. He said he would fix it, but instead he stopped paying for the server and it went down. A few months later, I bestowed upon Moot the cruddy Japanese PHP code that would eventually become Shiichan.
someone reqd. more world2ch stories, so here you go:
http://www.tedel.com/shii/test/read.php/lounge/1099846019/
I miss it :(
Squeeks is doing something similar with http://4-ch.net/. I don't know how much he knows about what world2ch did right or wrong, though, so why not go over there and help him out?
The obvious advantage of world2ch over 4-ch seems to be that the former was started partially by the Japanese who the nihongophile westeners had a natural interest in. I think 4-ch will have a more difficult start, as it confronts the aim of a somehow international community from the opposite angle. If there was some kind of hypothetical Japanese target audience for 4-ch, I guess it would be searched best on forums that are already focussing on some kind of exchange of communication between Japanese and westerners. Of course writing the smaller japanese image- and messageboards might also help, but that'd require a native speaker, I guess.
Maybe this would be a good start?
http://academy3.2ch.net/english/
I miss Caveman's posts on art history, the horrible poetry I wrote, baiting people in Cinema, trying to scare Mike Toole, annoying >>2 in the SA thread........etc
Memorable world2ch threads:
Death to SomethingAwful
http://web.archive.org/web/20031112170439/http://world2ch.net/test/read.cgi/pc/1064495162/
GOLGOLMOIIS ALL KILLER by ryukyu
http://web.archive.org/web/20031231151429/http://world2ch.net/test/read.cgi/news/1048996987/
Keepweep makes his debut on world2ch:
http://web.archive.org/web/20031202172122/http://world2ch.net/test/read.cgi/mona/1060964008/
world famous
golgolmois thread was the funniest thing i've read this week
Menchi more like "I'm Shii but I changed my name so people wouldn't realize the dumb posts I made back then were me"
>>18
Menchi started the "Death to SomethingAwful" thread?
I want the 4-cha to take over 2-chan as far as English threads
are concerned. Many posters on English treads are only kids.
So the messages are disgusting or boring.
I know this is an old thread, but I found this, not sure if it is worth noting or not, or has anything to with the original world2ch since I missed that
>>21
Results 1 - 10 of about 3,590 for lWV9WxNHV.. (0.33 seconds)
http://www.google.com/search?q=lWV9WxNHV.&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8