If you read the site last week, you may have seen a story about the new owner of 4chan, Hiroyuki Nishimura (The Daily Beast has an interesting read on him as, by the way). There’s some controversy about the guy, due to the fact that he’s alleged to have sold user data during his time at 2channel. In case you haven’t heard that part of the story, here’s a blurb about it from a widely read pastebin:

Things to know:

* ‘Hiroyuki’ recently purchased 4chan from Moot.
* ‘Hottolink’ is a Japanese big data analytics and data mining company. They specialize in mining and selling the data behind social media, blogs, and bbs/forums. They currently only provide service to Japanese and Chinese companies, utilizing data from 2ch, twitter, weibo, blogs, etc. Services they provide are product performance analysis and marketing solutions based on social media data.
* ‘Niconico Douga’ is Japan’s equivalent of youtube. Hiroyuki is some kind of employed with their project. Hiroyuki’s company Brazil Future Search provides the search solution for Niconico douga.
* ‘2ch.sc’ is Hiroyuki’s pirate site of 2ch.net. Hiroyuki made 2ch.sc to fulfill his contracts to Hottolink which provides him with millions of USD per annum according to Hottolink’s published financial report[1].
* ‘Brazil Future Search’ is Hiroyuki’s search engine company specializing in real-time search solutions. They currently provide search for Niconico Douga and 2ch.sc and others.
* ‘Effyis’ is a company that runs boardreader.com. They were recently bought out by Hottolink as the first expansion into the US market.

The Hiroyuki response:Nxn6RW6

I don’t really have a dog in the fight between Jim Watkins, the guy who runs 2channel, and Hiroyuki, it’s old chief. I also don’t know if all this shit about data selling is true. I’m just putting it out there. But it does look like Hotwheels Brennan, the admin of 8chan, and Watkins (the new owner of that operation as well) are seizing on this talking point in their latest messaging. Here’s the “press conference” video they uploaded to YouTube yesterday. I would have brought it to you a lot earlier, but the site was fucking up all weekend. That’s now solved. Even though CloudFlare did me dirty back in 2014, I’ve went back to them. The server has also been re-sized (Thx, Buttermancer!). So, things are moving a lot faster now. I think that should be noticeable for all of you as well. So, let me know what you think about that, and chime in on this story about the chans. I’ll also throw in MisterMetokur’s videos on it as well, in case you guys missed those.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsyoK02F27E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KFz9WRRNpk