From math tutoring to self-Googling, the nation's stars had a wonderfully unremarkable internet history
Imagine if every anonymous post you had ever left on Quora — half-baked homework queries, oddly specific life advice — was suddenly linked to your real name for the whole world to see.
That's more or less what happened this week in South Korea.
The culprit is Naver Jisik iN, Korea's answer to Quora or Yahoo! Answers — a crowdsourced Q&A platform on Naver, the country's dominant search engine, that launched back in 2002. In its heyday, it was the go-to for everything from calculus homework to breakup advice.
It also functioned as a casual online hangout — part forum, part social media. Here, users posted jokes, trolled one another and chased a ranking system that gave out points for every reply, turning the whole operation into a kind of knowledge-based role-playing game.
Social media and YouTube made it mostly obsolete years ago, but the posts remained.
On Wednesday evening, users noticed a new addition to celebrities' profiles on Naver: a small button sitting alongside the usual links to social media and official websites.
Click it, and you could browse the stars' full history of questions and answers — posts left under anonymous handles, in many cases over a decade ago, long before anyone knew their name.
Every singer, actor, athlete and YouTuber with a Naver profile suddenly had their forgotten Q&A history on full display.
Naver killed the feature by Wednesday night. On Thursday, the company issued a statement calling it an unintended error during a service update, adding that the rollback was completed around 10 p.m. and that it was reviewing all related processes to prevent a recurrence.
It was too late. Screenshots were already all over social media.
So, what did the stars all post?
The picture is somewhat incomplete; nobody could have possibly combed through every profile and every post in a matter of hours. But the surprise, for the most part, was how harmless it all turned out.
Rather than career-ending confessions or scorching hot takes, what people found were playful, cute little scraps of ordinary internet life.
Some posts were delightfully mundane. Son Yeon-jae, the rhythmic gymnast who went on to become a national sporting icon, left diet tips for a stranger back in 2006. She was 12 and offering advice about jogging and eating habits.
Comedian Lee Su-ji, now known for her YouTube alter egos and razor-sharp celebrity parodies, popped up in a 2008 thread about whether a particular online shopping mall was legit. Her contribution was a full-blown rant about the store's terrible service. She was 23.
The most impressive haul belonged to Lee Sang-hyeok — better known as Faker, widely regarded as the greatest League of Legends player of all time.
As a high school sophomore in 2012, he'd been fielding strangers' math questions on the platform, working through each equation step by step with textbook-level precision.
He also left lengthy, meticulously detailed guides for users asking about League of Legends strategy — all written in a near-encyclopedic register, grammatically pristine and spotlessly formatted. The consensus online: the man was simply wired differently from the start.
Other celebrities did the most tempting thing imaginable — answering questions about themselves while pretending to be someone else.
Actor Jeon So-min, a fixture of the long-running variety show "Running Man," once replied to a user who wanted to know the brand of an outfit she'd worn on a TV drama. She provided the info and cited her source as "myself lol."
Leeteuk, leader of veteran boy group Super Junior, fielded a question asking why he was so good-looking. His answer: he was born that way.
Some entries defied all categorization.
Actor Jo Woo-jin ("Guardian: The Lonely and Great God," "Narco-Saints") in 2008 wrote out the full Korean phonetic transcription of singer Rain's "Rainism" — every English lyric rendered syllable by syllable — for a stranger who'd simply asked how to pronounce the words. Quite the undertaking for a free platform with no reward.
moonkihoon@heraldcorp.com
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