Social media users seem to split fairly neatly by age group. The apps used across all age groups are 'KakaoTalk', 'YouTube', and 'Naver'. Teens especially favor 'Facebook Messenger', 'TikTok', and 'Roblox'. Users in their 20s use 'Instagram' the most, while those in their 30s rely on everyday apps like 'Coupang', 'Baemin (Baedal Minjok)', and 'Samsung Pay'. People in their 40s and 50s read news on the 'Daum' app or use the 'T map' navigation app, and users 60 and over mostly use 'KakaoStory' and 'Band'.
Now, on to online communities! I was born in 1974, so as of 2023 I am fifty in Korean age. I started using communities in earnest in late 2001, with 'Kim Yoo-sik's Digital Camera Inside'. I mostly posted photos in its 'Selfie Gallery' and built friendships through offline meetups. Then I started drawing in the 'Cartoon Gallery' under the name 'Jazzmania', but around 2003 I traced a famous webtoon artist's work, got publicly shamed, and was kicked out. After that, busy with work, I mostly lurked on 'Bobaedream', 'SLR Club', and the 'Ddanzi Ilbo board', posting only occasionally. Then I suddenly got curious and started this analysis. The baseline is July 2022. I divided monthly visitors by days to get daily visitors, calculated each circle's area from daily visitors, and positioned each community with the Y axis showing the male-to-female user ratio and the X axis showing progressive-to-conservative political leaning. The finished chart was both fascinating and surprising. Let me walk through it one point at a time.
1. DC Inside is enormously influential: DC Inside is a giant site with at least 3 million visitors a day on average, over 170 million page views daily, more than 1 million posts a day, and 2 to 3 million comments. Traffic from its 2,500+ galleries puts it within the top 150 sites worldwide. Many well-known communities also spun off from DC Inside, including FM Korea, Ilbe Storage, Megalia, Womad, Arca Live, Gaedrip.net, and Haeyeongal. DC Inside, FM Korea, and Ilbe, positioned as conservative and far-right, rank 1st, 2nd, and 7th among Korean communities, with men in their 20s and 30s as the main users. Rather than splintering into many small groups, they seem to be forming three big blocs, with conservative, center-right, and far-right positions.
2. The progressive side is split into many niches : The main users are presumed to be men in their 40s and 50s. Twenty years ago, in their 20s and 30s, those who loved SLR cameras hung out at 'SLR Club', car lovers at 'Bobaedream', gamers at 'Ruliweb', IT fans at 'Clien', electronics buffs at 'Ppomppu', fans of the bizarre at 'Ddanzi Ilbo', and those who liked a good laugh at 'Today's Humor'. After 20-plus years of active communities, the users who were in their 20s and 30s then have aged along with them. Back then they were young, hot-blooded James Deans rebelling against the established order; at some point they became department heads, executives, and business owners, with kids in middle school, high school, and college, or old enough for military service. They say men on average stop seeking out new music after 33 and just keep replaying what they already know, and political leanings seem the same. The bad feelings toward military regimes, heard from the "386" generation seniors, and toward the conservative governments that followed, don't change easily with age.
3. There are neutral communities too: Three communities sit in the middle: “Inven,” “MLB Park,” and “Ygosu.” Inven was founded in the second half of 2004 and offers high-quality game information and news. Its main users are relatively young men, and many early users disliked DC Inside, but today conservatives, centrists, and progressives seem to coexist there. MLB Park began in 2001 when baseball fans gathered on a personal site. Rather than a progressive or conservative political leaning, it tends to criticize whoever is in power, which is why I classified it as “centrist.” Come election season, both conservatives and progressives seem to run various operations to shape public opinion in their favor. Ygosu began in 2007 as a community of StarCraft fans, and I see it as a centrist community that leans more conservative than the chart above.
4. Women’s communities vary greatly by age: “feminism”: According to its operator, “TheQoo” is a women-centered community that is 80 to 90% female, with women in their 40s at its core; its politics lean progressive and show a feminist bent. “82cook” grew out of “MyClub,” which was fairly popular in the early 2000s among married women, and the “Sunyoung-a, I love you” guerrilla marketing campaign it ran back then was famous. MyClub split into “Lemon Terrace,” centered on young women, and “82cook,” centered on older users. It is a progressive community without hate speech or profanity. “Instiz” is a community of young women from their late teens to mid-20s; it is less “misandrist,” but also shows a “feminist” leaning. “Nate Pann” was treated as the women’s version of “DC Inside” and “Ilbe” from 2006 to 2010, and it is known for so many malicious comments, provocations, and anti-male posts that the slur “Pan-nyeo” emerged. “Womad” was spun off from “Megalia,” an even harsher version of Nate Pann that was shut down in 2017. It features extreme feminism and many anti-male posts, and it promotes fierce female supremacy. It has no notion of politics, only an attitude toward the gender conflict.
5. The lower-right corner, conservative women, is empty: This question comes up a lot: "Is there no conservative women's community?" Conservative leanings are overwhelming among men and women over 60, usually above 60%. But the places where they are active online are KakaoTalk group chats and 'Naver Band', which feel like text messaging and are easy to use. Because so few older people use communities at all, they drop out of this positioning map.
When I was in my 20s, conservative political views were most common among people in their 50s and older. Over the past 20 years, the progressive 20- and 30-somethings of that era have become progressive 40- and 50-somethings. Today, in 2023, the 20- and 30-somethings born in the mid-to-late 1990s seem to be more conservative, shaped by North Korea's provocations in the 2010s, China's unofficial ban on Korean content, gender conflict, and the conservative political establishment's full-scale online campaigns. If we manage the underlying data more finely against quantitative criteria and update it regularly, I suspect interesting trends will keep emerging.
To be continued