Daum Agora

» see agora.media.daum.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Daum was the portal South Korea used heavily before Naver took the country, and Agora was the room inside it where people argued. It opened in December 2004 under a name borrowed from the Athenian marketplace. Several boards ran under it, but the two that counted were the debate board and the petition board, and the petition board carried no legal force whatsoever, which turned out not to matter.

I have no Korean and never held a Daum account. In 2008, when Agora was the loudest address on the Korean internet, I was finishing up at university in Ankara and reading donanimhaber and frmtr, where the arguments were about graphics cards far more often than about the government. Agora is a place whose numbers I can read without ever having been in the room.

Those numbers are the reason it gets a grave here. Over fifteen years roughly ten million people posted around thirty million times, and the petition board took in more than two hundred thousand petitions carrying some forty five million signatures. A single petition calling for the impeachment of President Lee Myung-bak gathered 1.3 million names.

Kakao, which merged with Daum in 2014, posted the closing notice on 3 December 2018 and shut the board on 7 January 2019. The company's wording was that plenty of varied spaces for conversation now existed and Agora had finished what it was for. Mizznet, Daum's women's community, went out in the same announcement.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the summer of the candles ~

In 2008 the Lee government agreed to resume American beef imports and central Seoul filled with candlelight vigils for weeks. Agora is where much of that was organized and most of it was argued out. Daily visitors climbed to about 1.4 million and the volume of posting rose roughly sixfold after the agreement was signed. Out in the street, protest banners carried the board's name.

That was the high-water mark and also the beginning of the trouble. Successive administrations watched the board closely, and Chosun Ilbo cut its news supply to Daum in 2008 over how the portal had handled the protests.

~ the minerva case ~

The economy board produced the most famous anonymous poster in Korean internet history. A user writing as Minerva published long, confident forecasts about the won and the unfolding financial crisis through 2008, and a great many readers took him for someone with inside access. He was arrested in January 2009 under a clause of the telecommunications framework act that criminalized spreading false information to harm the public interest. He turned out to be Park Dae-sung, an unemployed man in his thirties from a vocational college background.

He was acquitted at trial that April, and in December 2010 the Constitutional Court struck the clause down for vagueness. A discussion board on a portal had become the test case for whether writing on the internet could be a crime.

~ what took the petitions ~

Agora's petition board was a volunteer arrangement with nobody obliged to answer it. In August 2017 the Moon administration opened a petition site on the presidential office's own domain, promising an official reply on video to anything clearing two hundred thousand signatures in a month. Once the government ran its own petition desk, the version sitting on a portal lost the one thing that had given it weight.

The rest of it drifted to Twitter and to the comment threads under news articles, the same erosion that emptied forums everywhere else. Kakao left no public archive behind. agora.media.daum.net does not answer today, and what survives of fifteen years is whatever the crawlers happened to catch.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »