Nate Jisik (네이트 지식)

» see ask.nate.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In October 2000 a Seoul newspaper opened a website where readers asked each other things, and that is where Korean knowledge search begins. It was called DBDic and it was run by Internet Hankyoreh, the online arm of the Hankyoreh daily, whose copyright line sat in the footer of every page until 2003. On an early November day that first autumn the homepage printed its own vital signs: yesterday, 290 questions and 365 answers.

It was not a message board with a question mark over the door. DBDic was built as a market. The currency was points, and one point was worth exactly one Korean won inside the site. You got them either by answering well or by paying for them. Then you spent them on other people. One of the site's sections existed so that you could put a file from your own machine up with a price on it, and wait for somebody who needed it to pay to open it. A surviving purchase screen shows an essay about presidential primaries listed at four hundred points to read.

Members were called dbizens and ranked as whales. A baby whale was anyone under a thousand points. Above that came the student whale, then the honors whale, where the site's own help page cheerfully diagnosed the early symptoms of DBDic addiction, and at the top the doctor whale and the master whale past fifty thousand. Every week one person was named keeper of the whales and paid ten thousand points for the title.

~ the dossier ~

~ the book made of answers ~

In July 2001 DBDic published a book. It was called Do You Know That?, it came out through the publisher Munhaksegyesa, it cost 8,200 won, and it collected about four hundred of the site's own questions and answers with cartoons by the artist Jung Hoon-i. The members chose what went in it and voted on the title, and the revenue was shared back with them, which the paper presented as the first content fund publication in Korea. There was a link on the live site where you signed the consent form to be in it. Two more editions followed in March and August 2002.

The site had around 40,000 questions and answers after its first six months, spread over some ninety categories, and more than 150,000 pieces of member-written knowledge by early 2002. Hankyoreh had turned its readers into a reference work and then sold the reference work back to them in hardcopy, with the people who wrote it on the royalty statement.

~ one month later, for free ~

None of it made money. In September 2002 DBDic reorganized itself into an explicit knowledge exchange, with the title bar changing from community to exchange, and it put part of the service behind a payment. On 7 October 2002, a month after that, Naver launched Knowledge iN and did not charge for it. Naver's own tenth-anniversary release gives the date without noticing what it sits next to.

Users who had already been unhappy about paying left faster once there was a free equivalent. Six months after the paywall went up, on 28 February 2003, the company behind Empas bought DBDic from Internet Hankyoreh. The price has never been disclosed anywhere and should not be guessed at. The Hankyoreh service stopped on 13 March, and the handover notice is one of the more decent documents in this whole story: the cash balances were not transferred but refunded, and the rules were loosened on the way out, from a minimum claim of fifty thousand points with a thirty percent fee down to anything over five hundred with no fee at all. Moving your account to Empas was opt-in, and if you did nothing your mileage simply ended. The questions and answers themselves went across, with a standing right for any author to demand deletion.

~ the friend alert ~

SK Communications bought Empas in October 2006 for 37.2 billion won and a convertible bond position, and on 28 February 2009 folded the whole portal into Nate. The knowledge corpus came out the other side at ask.nate.com, and SK Communications did something with it that Naver never attempted: it wired the questions into the instant messenger. If you ticked the friend-alert box, your question fired as a NateOn message to everybody on your buddy list. Ticking it earned you a point. Answering a friend's question earned you double. A question asked that way could not be closed by the person who asked it, only by a public vote.

It also went looking for credentials. The guide page from 2010 lists seventeen partner sites whose own specialists answered inside Nate, a range running from DCInside and Ruliweb to the Press Arbitration Commission and the government's own civil-complaints portal. On top of that sat twenty-one named hospital doctors listed by department and five certified labor attorneys standing behind the employment questions. By 2012 Knowledge iN was taking some fifty thousand questions a day, and Nate's answer to that was to put a named professional at the other end instead.

~ the last index it owned ~

By November 2014 the portal had been hollowed out from the inside. Look at the search boxes on the Nate knowledge page in that month's capture and the general web search button submits to Daum, a competitor, because SK Communications had handed its search operation over. The only index Nate still ran on its own servers was the pile of answers it had bought from a newspaper in 2003. Between 28 November and 11 December a notice went up saying that index was being switched off, which it was, ahead of the service it indexed.

The shutdown modal appeared on the homepage between 16 and 28 November, adding about eight hundred bytes to it. It gave three dates and no reason. Service ends 7 January 2015. Data backup runs from 7 January to 10 March, about two months, and the sentence underneath says that once the window closes the data cannot be recovered, so please back it up. Leftover mileage gets converted into gifts on 11 March. What was on offer was the ability to log in and download your own posts to your own computer. Nothing was said about the corpus as a whole, which was fourteen years of Koreans answering each other, and nobody wrote a word about where it went.

The Korean press did not cover the closure. The tombstone went up at ask.nate.com on the morning of 7 January and the apex redirected to it; by the summer the address was serving a bare Apache 404 instead. It still has a DNS record today, pointing at an address where nothing answers. Knowledge iN is still running.

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