Daum T!P

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

~ the last words ~

A gold medal on Daum T!P paid one million won a month. Silver paid half of that, and the tiers below it stepped down to ten thousand won for the smallest amount of answering the system would recognize at all. The money came out of the advertising those answers earned, which Daum said it was returning to users in full rather than keeping.

The whole thing ran in Korean for a Korean knowledge pool, and that is the honest limit of what I can tell you about using it. A question and answer site is only usable in the language it is asked in, and the Korean search war it was losing never surfaced in anything I was reading from Ankara. What I can read is the paperwork, which is unusually complete for a service this size.

Daum had been running a knowledge service since the early 2000s. On 25 September 2014 it reorganized that into Daum T!P at tip.daum.net, and the pitch was that you typed your question and the system found the right place for it instead of making you choose a category first. Broad categories gave way to narrower topics, each with a Topic Master picked for activity, and badges accumulated for asking and for answering, with a separate set for the connections between the two.

The scholarship tiers were abolished as of January 2020. The closure notice went up on 17 February and set the end at 31 March 2020, with a three month window afterward, 1 April to 30 June, in which you could ask for your own questions and answers to be mailed back to you. Kakao told the Korean press it would put its search effort into KakaoTalk's search tab and into Daum search instead.

~ the record ~

~ paying for answers ~

Paying answerers was not something Daum improvised at the end. The older service had an Expert program where a monthly quota of answers earned a scholarship and sustained work earned a certificate, and that program closed with the September 2014 reorganization. What carried over into T!P was the money itself, graded into seven tiers by how much you had answered in a month, with the top three reviewed by hand before anything was paid.

It is a defensible thing to try. Naver Knowledge-iN had taken the Korean Q&A market on sheer volume, and volume comes from people who answer for free because everyone else is already there. If you cannot buy the crowd, you can at least buy the answerers, and for five and a half years Daum did exactly that.

~ the fall ~

The problem with buying answerers shows up in the order the pieces came off. The scholarship tiers were abolished as of January 2020 and the service itself was gone by the end of March. Nothing that was paid for stayed once the payment stopped.

Features had been dropping off for a decade before that. The blogger-answer option, which cross-posted your reply to your own blog through a trackback, went with the 2014 reorganization. The certified-knowledge cafe tie-in had closed back on 11 January 2010.

~ the last notice ~

tip.daum.net has no address at all now. The closing page stayed up long enough to explain the backup window and then went with the subdomain. Daum's own announcement survives in the company notice archive, a short administrative thing giving the end date and the backup instructions and little else.

The notice is dated 17 February 2020. The service had forty-three days left when it went up.

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